Phantoms of the Past
by stefanie bean
Summary: Erik is dead, and Christine returns to bury him, but past secrets don't stay that way. Based on Leroux. Rated M for sexuality, violence, and intense images in later chapters. COMPLETE.
1. Erik is Dead

_From the personal papers of Christine de Chagny, nee Daae. Discovered after her death in 1934 in the attic of her Brussels home, they now reside in the restricted collections of the Paris Opera House library, along with the memoirs of her son, Dr. Philippe de Chagny._

_The document is undated, but was probably written in the months after the 1913 death of her husband, Raoul de Chagny._

"**Erik is Dead"**

It's been almost four months since Raoul's death. The maids unpack my bags while I sit down with tea and pen in this dusty old house in a quiet Brussels street. Sheets still cover most of the furniture and black crepe covers the mirrors.

The mirrors are hidden to keep away the ghosts, but now the spirits of two men haunt me.

After the funeral, Martina and Jannecke bundled me into their carriage and carted me off to their house in Leuven like a wet, drooping parcel. Grief and grandmothering exhausted me, and I slept whole days through, even without the sticky-sweet syrup of laudanum.

One morning Martina came into my room and roused me from bed, saying, "Mother, you can't stay there the rest of your life. You have to get up now," as though I were the daughter instead of her, and I obeyed.

"Help me with the mending," she commanded, and we sorted through a mound of sheets and shifts, nightshirts and trousers, little girls' frocks and pinafores all stacked in piles almost as high as Martina's two little girls themselves.

Six weeks later, she handed me off to my eldest child Philippe in Grobbendonk, just outside of Antwerp. It was in his sprawling, noisy, child-filled farmhouse that I slowly came to life and could reminisce over thirty years with my husband, their grandfather.

"We can't leave you alone, Mother," Philippe and Anki said repeatedly. "Close up the house, come live with us, it's too much for you."

"I'll consider it," I said at the time. However, the breeze playing through this high-windowed room carries on it the memory of Philippe at the cello, accompanying me in song, while Raoul looks up in appreciation from his books or writing. This waft of harmony makes me loath to leave.

I'm a strong woman, fifty-three next year, and the decades stretch out ahead like a dry lake bed extending to the bleak, salt-crusted horizon. Here in this high-ceilinged house there is no husband to make a request or press a surprise kiss on my neck; no children to accompany to the park or confer with in a family council; no grandbabes to stuff my stamps or sealing wax into their mouths. Except for the maids who silently dust and pull down sheets, I am entirely alone with my papers, my pen, and my memories.

We didn't always live in this cool and spacious neo-Italianate splendor. After Raoul and I crept together out of the Opera's Rue Scribe passageway into the dreary Paris dawn, still scarcely believing we had gotten out alive, I went home to the little flat on the Rue-de-Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Raoul went to his club until the complaints from his family, the frequent visits of the police detectives, and the clubmaster's demands for payment forced him into a rooming house.

After a few weeks, the police seemed to lose interest in Raoul, but he wasn't convinced. He came to the flat one evening, frightened, and certain he was being followed. "They're waiting to see what I do, to see if I leave Paris," he said in a trembling voice.

"Then don't leave Paris," I answered.

"The sooner we get out of this tomb the better. Let's go now, they can stop me at the station if they like. You aren't bound to some promise you made to a madman."

"I'll leave Paris when everything's finished," I told him. "No, don't protest, because I gave my word. Not one day sooner."

Turning on me, he cried, "You've done this before, you know. Do you remember when you took me to the roof of the Opera House, and I begged you to come with me that very night? You didn't listen to me then, and you won't listen to me now. 'Oh, it will kill him if I leave now,' you said. What is this perverse need you have to feel sorry for him?"

I stared out the window at the bleak, sunless day. "I don't blame you for hating me," I said quietly. "If I had listened to you, Philippe would still be alive."

He put his head in his hands. "If I had made you go, Philippe would have lived as well. You're a woman, and I don't blame you for the natural weakness that led you to yield to the stronger man. It was my failure of will that killed him."

Yielded, yes, I thought, to what strength you cannot imagine. "I failed you miserably," I said finally. "But I have no choice now."

His glance snapped down to my left hand. "And you still wear his ring. I hate it, it reminds me that you remain his slave."

"I said that I would wear it until he died."

"That could take years," he snorted sarcastically.

"I don't think so. He didn't seem to think it would be more than a few weeks."

"What man knows the hour of his death? We already know that suicide held no terrors for him. That's the only way a man could predict it, if he planned to kill himself at some appointed time."

"I don't think he plans to kill himself," I said, but without conviction. "When I … when we saw him last, he was very ill."

"I won't go back there," he said, voice fierce and stubborn.

"I don't expect you to."

"How will you do it? How will a girl like you bury a man, and a tall man at that? And what if he isn't really dead, but kidnaps you again? I've lost Philippe, and now I might lose you, too. Can't you see that? If you loved me you would see that."

This had occurred to me, and I had no answer.

He picked up his top hat and strode angrily toward the door, then turned to deliver one last salvo before leaving. "I don't believe you love me. No girl who loved a man would go back to the home of the rival who kidnapped her, threatened to kill her, her fiance, and one who would have been your brother, too. Not to mention all those hundreds in the auditorium. I pointed out that he may take you again, and you have no answer. Well, as they say, 'silence gives consent.'

"He's a dog, Christine, and he deserves to die like one. When a carriage runs over a dog, we don't give the dog a burial. We sweep it up with the rest of the refuse."

"I made an oath. I am going to keep it," I said quietly. "You want me to say I love you. What good would it do for me to tell you I love you, if you know that I break promises? You aren't bound to the promise I made. For that matter, you aren't bound to me."

He turned his flaming furious face toward me, saying, "Very well. Please yourself as you always have. Nevertheless, if you don't return, don't expect me to descend into that charnel house again to fetch you out. You want him, you can have him, and moulder right along with him. I wouldn't bury him, Christine. I would let him rot in hell like he rotted here on earth." He slammed on his top hat and banged the door behind him. Downstairs the concierge exclaimed angrily as he stalked by.

That night the dream didn't come, the one that left me sick and gagging on awakening. I fled Erik through a maze of stone corridors as his breath sounded behind me ever closer. By some dream magic he stood there ahead of me around a corner, waiting. His arms clasped me with terrible strength. Struggling into his grasp I fell, but then melted. The terror lay not in the pursuit, but in the surrender.

It was the first night without the dream since I had left the Opera through the Rue Scribe door.

The next day brought no mail from Raoul, nor the next. He's going to leave me after all, it seemed, and that thought brought sadness and relief. He doesn't need to suffer any more because of me.

But late afternoon of the next Saturday he knocked on my door. "I've just come back from confession," he said as he lingered in the hallway, afraid to come in.

I nodded, gesturing towards the parlor. While Mama Valerius slept and the maid washed dishes in the kitchen, he knelt at my feet.

"It was the old priest, the one whom they say can 'see your soul.' He gave me an odd penance. I had to read _Antigone_."

"What?" I said, astonished. "Please, sit up next to me."

He pressed my hands to his breast. Under his vest, his chest trembled, and the breath went noisily in and out as he struggled with his emotion. "You know, the play by Sophocles," he said. "It made no sense to me at first, either. But then I saw exactly what he meant."

I held him tenderly as he sobbed without tears, his head resting on my shoulder. "Please forgive me," he whispered.

Erik was strong but so terribly thin, while Raoul's strength hid under a light cushion of soft flesh. So different, yet both had the ways of men. This would be far easier if Raoul just left me. Then he wouldn't hear what I have to tell him. I should drive him away rather than bring him such terrible news, but I can't do it. Not while he's so tender under my hands. Maybe it's all premature worry on my part anyway. Maybe nothing will come of it, and I won't have to tell him anything at all.

"I do forgive you," I said softly. " But I'm not Antigone, nor are you Creon." Nor was Erik my brother, oh no, but that thought stayed unspoken. "What does _Antigone_ have to do with any of this?"

"Polynieces was an enemy of the state, Christine, a traitor to crown and country," Raoul said intently. "In his rage for revenge, King Creon declared that no one should bury his body. He left Polynieces to rot on the field of battle, to become the prey of the crows. When Antigone was caught pouring dust three times over her brother, making the prayers for the dead, she said this,"

_And should I seem to thee_

_To have done a foolish deed, _

_'Tis simply this: _

_I bear the charge of folly from a fool. _

"I've been the fool. I'll go with you. Even a man's worst enemy deserves the respect due the dead. It freezes the blood in my body to think of returning, but I can't let you go back there alone."

A great wave of relief swept over me, not to have to go into that mausoleum by myself. Raoul, however, was being watched.

I shook my head. "Think, Raoul. You already know the police spied on you at your club, and now they have your lodgings under surveillance. They always say 'a murderer returns to the scene of the crime.' What do you think they'll do if they see you going with me back under the Paris Opera?"

He swallowed, hard. "You don't think the police will follow you? If they're trailing me, they know I visit you. They know you were with me the night Philippe was murdered. They'll track you like a rabbit."

"They might, but I know some of those tunnels. I don't have to go in through Rue Scribe, anyway. He showed me passages and trap doors all over the Opera. I can slip into a corridor and disappear entirely." I sat quietly and thought. "Anyway, does it really matter, once he's dead? He'll be beyond the reach of the law, at least of man's law. Let the police question me, after that. I'll tell them everything they want to know."

He wiped his hands wearily over his face. "I'll write the Persian, and ask him to help you."

"Do you trust him? You told me he already went to the police, and they didn't believe him. That detective, what was his name? Mifroid? He said he would keep an eye on the Persian, so you said. For all we know, Mifroid might suspect the Persian in Philippe's death as well. I don't think we can rely on the Persian."

"Christine, how will you do it?"

"How much strength does it take to lift three handfuls of earth?"

He looked away, stricken. Then the maid left for the afternoon after setting out the tea things. Since Mama Valerius slept on, we kissed for a long time on the sofa while the tea cooled and the sandwiches dried out. My hand crept under his vest and around the soft and malleable curve of his stomach. Into my breast went his hot face, murmuring that he loved me, he was sorry, he never meant to hurt me.

Then Mama Valerius woke and called for me from the bedroom. He left with his flushed face and the stiff, awkward walk every respectable maiden ignores. I swallowed my bitter pity for him. You love me now. What will you think next month, or the one after?

Each day after that, I scanned the personal columns of _L'Epoque._ On the next Saturday bitter with sleet, there appeared the shortest and strangest obituary ever to grace those pages.

It said, _Erik is dead._ Corporal work of mercy, or the foolishness of insanity, who could tell? It didn't matter. It was time to go.

I still dream of him, even after these long decades. It's a different dream now. The corridors are still the same, still long, still stony, and still cold. Instead of fleeing him, I search for him and turn every corner. I call his name, but he is never there.

Into that black necropolis I went, bringing with me all the horror I feared, and bringing out from that tomb reeking of death only sorrow and compassion. The horror I buried with Erik, after measuring his great heart on the golden scales of eternity, and finding it to want for nothing at all.

(_continued..._)


	2. Lady Lazarus

**Lady Lazarus**

I sat here for almost an hour at the writing-desk. The ink dried on the nib, the tea turned cold in the cup, but I was unable to write of that trip to the underworld where I found what I least expected, Erik still living.

Later, perhaps. It's as if Erik's hand itself rests on mine, long and white and deceptively delicate, and Erik's pure, clear voice says, _Tell of me alive, first. Tell of me alive as a man, even though I lived and loved as a man for only a short time._

_Do not introduce me as a walking corpse, or a stinking skeleton days from death,_ says that voice, lightly touching me with that restraining hand. _Give me a little credit for my life, such as it was. Show how I loved you, first, before you show how I died. Give me at least that. _ I assent, and the white hand withdraws, caressing my hair in the movement of the breeze.

It occurs to me that I am about as old now as you were, Erik, when you died. How I wish I could talk with you about this fear that creeps up daily now, the cold breath that stirs the hairs on my neck, that leads me to calculate each grain of each minute that slips through the narrow waist of the day's hourglass.

How I wish we could have been the same age.

You felt this, didn't you, when you begged me, desperate and demanding, to love you, as if love was something you could command. You wanted to command everything, to drive time itself forward under the lash of your will, because you yourself were lashed by time, lashed by death.

Thirty-two years ago I returned to the land of the living, after crawling through the Rue Scribe gate for the last time. I blinked in the bright stabbing sunlight. Carriages, passers-by, street vendors and their urchin children all danced like living magic-lantern puppets animated by a giant lamp in the sky. No rough policeman seized my arm to drag me off for interrogation. No shroud covered my face. No one called me to come forth. I didn't even know what day it was.

The great iron key dragged at my pocket, and so I threw it into a sewer. Light as air I walked home. Nothing bound me to Paris any longer, but Mama Valerius didn't understand.

"What about your Angel of Music?" she kept saying, and I repeated, "You know there was no 'angel,' Mama, I explained it to you. There was only a man, and his name was Erik, but he's dead now."

"Dead?" she said stupidly. "How can an angel die?"

I pinched my nails into my palm; better to focus on that pain instead of her advancing senility. "I've just come from his funeral," I said. "Angels don't have funerals."

"So that's where you were," she said placidly. "I haven't been to a funeral in a long time. I love funerals. Such pretty singing. Oh, I remember now. He was the one you loved, when you wouldn't accept the proposal from that boy."

I told myself over and over, she's old, she can't help it, she's not responsible. "Mama," I said, "You must do this for me. He's dead, and you are never to speak of him again, do you hear? Never," and by some miracle of God she didn't.

I bathed multiple times, aired my clothes, cleaned and blacked my boots, but death hung all around me like a smell. Raoul expected me to write him when I came back from my charnel errand, but the pens sat untouched, the ink bottle unopened.

Perhaps he thinks Erik still lives, and that I've run away with him. That will hurt him, but less than he knows. I won't write him. If he thinks I've gone, he'll make a new life for himself. If he wants me, let him come. Not that it matters. With or without him, I can't stay here.

He came to see me the next day, the day after I staggered forth from that tomb. Earlier in the afternoon I'd spent hours trying to convince Mama Valerius that it was time to move, that we were leaving Paris, and my nerves rasped with tension and frustration. Uncomprehending, Mama toddled off for her nap, while Raoul and I sat in the parlor stiffly, not touching.

"So it's over," he said finally, staring at my hand now free of the round gold symbol of my bondage.

"Perhaps not quite. I didn't tell you everything," I said.

His pale, almost grey face shook and he said, "Look, I've had almost no sleep this month with the nightmares. It's only through Uncle Auguste's influence that I haven't been arrested. He's head of the family now, and I shudder to think what that means. He's suing me over the inheritance, and in the duration he probably won't give me a centime. The family have proclaimed me guilty and guillotined already, except for my sisters, and their husbands work on them night and day."

"Then," he went on, "you're living here with a woman whose mind fades by the minute. Your career at the Paris Opera is finished; they wouldn't have you back as a charwoman."

"I have a little money saved," I interrupted. "I can sell my fur and my mother's rings."

He twisted his hands into fists and pressed them into the velvet settee. "Now, as if this isn't enough, you tell me it's not quite over. Christine, he's dead now. It's supposed to be over. It has to be over or I shall go mad."

This in some ways was even harder than my descent into that necropolis below the Opera. Afraid to start, more afraid not to, I said in a trembling voice, "Raoul, about that ring. There's something I didn't tell you about it. It didn't just look like a wedding ring. It was a wedding ring."

He said nothing at first, then his face twitched. He clenched his fists and drew himself up, shivering as he tried to maintain control.

"Do you see that poker over there by the fireplace?" he gestured.

I looked over at the fireplace tools in confusion. "Yes?"

"Why not take it and run me through with it? It would hurt less." Then he sat for a few moments, running his hands over his face. Finally he said, still unbelieving, "You were secretly married, then? With all that implies?"

"I'm afraid so," I answered. "With all it implies."

He put his head down onto his knees, and when I tried to touch his shoulder, he shook me off convulsively. "You played me false all along," he said, muffled. "It's what Philippe always suspected, and what I was too blind with love for you to see."

The bright early spring sun mocked the cold, leaden atmosphere in that sad little room. Why isn't he getting up? I wondered. It would be so easy for him to stride for the door and disappear. But there he sits, hating me, yet staying.

He raised himself up, his face streaked with tears. "When, Christine? When did this happen?"

"The night of the Masquerade Ball," I choked out.

He sat, calculating days and weeks, counting months. "How could I forget that wedding night song from _Romeo et Juliette_? Erik didn't just pick that particular composition at random, did he, when he came for you that night after the Masked Ball? A man who sings 'Night of our marriage ... night of voluptuous delights' to a woman has to have only one thing in mind. It explains volumes, doesn't it? Only I was too blind to realize.

"It's why you told me you couldn't marry. I sat here in this very room the day after the ball, playing the fool with you and Mme. Valerius. Just out of curiosity, Christine, did Mme. Valerius know? Was that why she took your part that afternoon and practically showed me the door? Does she know now?"

"I told her then," I said sadly, "and made her promise to keep it a secret. But she's forgotten it, if she ever really comprehended it to start with. My Mama's mind fails rapidly, Raoul, as you have noticed."

Ticking off weeks with his fingers, he went on, "So when you took my hands and kissed me on the rooftop, you seemed willing to run away, but not as my wife. At least that shows some nobility of character. You were willing to abandon your husband, but not to implicate me in adultery." He looked away. "I suppose I can thank you for that."

"Raoul," I whispered, "I'm so sorry. I had to leave him. You don't understand."

He rose and stalked around the room. He'll wake Mama, I thought, but better he pace than throw something or hit me.

"If you had to leave him, as you say, then why wouldn't you leave right away? I begged to take you out of Paris that very night, but you refused. You gave me this impression that it was because you were so dedicated to your art! What were you thinking, to not tell me at all?"

I flushed down to the bone, because that was exactly what I had considered, exactly what I would have done. Silently I sat before him like a prisoner at the bench, and my accusers were the clean white rags that sat in my bottom drawer all that month, unused.

"I didn't want to hurt you," I said, stiff with shame because there was no help for it, I was going to hurt him whether I willed it or not.

"Why are you telling me now?" he demanded. "Perhaps I might have not wanted to know. It explains so much, but I am not sure the explanation was worth the price. So you couldn't have married me, not before God, because by our faith you already were bound."

"Bound by force," I said, "which you know in our faith makes no true marriage," but was that really true? How coerced had I been?

"The law of nature doesn't change," he answered. "You know that what makes a marriage is neither the priest, nor the church, nor the Third Republic. A marriage before God is made up of the promise and the consummation. Which from what you said obviously took place."

"I know my catechism as well as you. He's dead, so any binding there might have been is certainly loosed now."

Raoul looked at me with a stiff, twisted face, and from his lips came the cruel words, "Really, can I believe you? Or is he alive somewhere hiding out, laughing at my foolishness, waiting for you to return to him? You've already admitted to playing me false; why should I heed your words now? You've already shown yourself ready to leave one husband, why not me?"

"Raoul, you saw him. He almost killed us all. You would have wanted me to stay with him? It sounds like you are taking his side!"

"Didn't I give you to him, when I told you to turn the scorpion?"

"Yes," I said quietly, "you did."

"Of course, I didn't know then that you were already his. Christine, don't you understand? Why do you need a Rosetta Stone to decipher your own feelings? The months I spent in confusion, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say or how to act, and it was all so clear, so simple."

"If it was so simple," I sniffed, losing the battle against tears, "explain it to me. I seem to have lost the ability to tell if something is simple or not."

Besides the death of his brother Philippe, the worst devastation for Raoul over his whole life was the loss of his career as a naval officer. He would have been so brave, such a leader. In that desperate room so long ago he pushed bravely through pain, through his own devastation and loss, ignoring it all for what he loved. He wanted to know, to understand, to find me, and all I wanted to do was hide like a ship slinking around the corner of some dark granite-crusted fjord.

"It was the simplest thing in the world," he said, standing over me. "He loved you! I understand that, because I love you, and I will tell you honestly before God that some days I curse the fact that I do. I think I know Erik better than you, because I know what it is to feel a love that not only tears you apart, but tears apart the fabric of your life as well, a love like a fatal disease that no medicine will cure. Erik loved you like that. So do I. The difference is in how we express it. Erik killed for that love. I, on the other hand, am not planning on killing anyone."

"I don't need you to tell me that Erik loved me. God help the woman who is loved that way."

"But you loved him, too. I told you that more than once, do you recall? You denied it."

"I did. But it was true."

Onto my shoulders went his heavy hands. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you for admitting it." He pulled me up to drape me tightly against his body, his comforting chest and stomach warm against mine. Where the cheek meets the mouth he planted a soft, swift kiss, brief but tender all the same.

Softly he said, "Please tell me. You accepted his ring, and you accepted the rest of him as well. No, don't recoil. You can't run from it, for I won't let you. After accepting him, you came to me and begged me to carry you off against your will, even if you refused to go. Why did you want to leave him? Yes, I know he was terrifying, and mad, but it is a peculiar kind of madness that seemed to turn itself on and off like a faucet. The man that carried me back from the Communard dungeon I would not have deemed mad.

"Do you understand why I ask, why I need to know?" he implored.

"Because you love me, and you still fear I will betray you," and he nodded, go on.

"I was so frightened, Raoul, because for every stroke of pain from Erik came also a stroke of delight," and he looked away. "You want truth? Here is the truth. I deceived him,and I deceived you. I won't blame you if you go, but if you go, go knowing that I love you more than anything, and that once I was willing to lay myself down in a living grave in exchange for your life."

"You should have gone with me that night we talked on the roof," he said, softening, still holding me against his warm front.

"Yes, I should have," I answered. "We were like children who scattered all their toys over the nursery, and now the governess has come in to make us clean them up."

He made a noise as if to say, what do you mean?

When you have come back from the land of the dead, you don't fear a second death. After that, there is nothing anyone can do to you. The rest had to come out.

"There could be a child. It's too soon to know for certain."

"Dear God," he said, and he dropped his arms. "Loving you is a blood sport, isn't it?"

I didn't think there was anything left in me to break after these past two months, but apparently there was, and it did. Between sobs, I told him that I loved him, that I had always loved him, and that whatever I had done, I did out of compulsion and fear for my life. I would release him from any promises to me, and if there was a child, I would find refuge in some convent somewhere and give it to the sisters, as it would be impossible for me to stay here.

How pale, how puffy in the face he had become in the past month, but his eyes were steady. "I can't let a child of yours go into an orphanage. My eldest sister and her husband were contributors to one, and I toured it once with them. I was around sixteen," and he laughed ruefully.

"Perhaps they intended it to be a lesson to me. If so, it worked. It horrifies me to this very day. To think of a child with your eyes, your face, your voice, left languishing in a crib like a cage, shivering in a ragged shift, left to cry year in and year out, never to be held … Christine, I can't bear it. Most of those children die, and I can't let that happen. I won't."

I had heard that tone before, when he convinced me to sacrifice myself to save not only his life, but the lives of hundreds of opera-goers.

"Marry me," he said. "Even though I may have no title if Uncle Auguste and the family council decide to strip me of it, even if they come to arrest me for Philippe's murder, marry me."

"And any infant? You'll raise it up as your own?" I asked.

"You have my word," he said. "I can't promise that I will love it. But I will treat it fairly and with kindness."

He took my hands, and then I wept openly, like a child who didn't know until just that moment how precarious her circumstances were.

Into his arms he drew me. I whispered softly, thank you, oh, thank you, and we held each other's broken hearts tenderly in our hands.

(_con't…_)


	3. Northbound Train

**Northbound Train**

Erik was dead, so with Mama Valerius in tow, we crept to the railway station in darkness to catch a midnight train. Her swollen bluish legs pained her as she shambled from the ticket window to the platform. There was no one to hide from any longer, yet we crept like children in the dark who feared to be caught by some grown-up.

None of the few travelers gave us a second glance, with Raoul in plain black clothes and I dressed in simple mourning. We looked like a middle-class couple embarking on a holiday, rather than a disgraced lord and an ex-diva. Only Mama Valerius looked like herself, an ailing old woman. When Raoul motioned us towards the second-class carriage, I looked up at him in surprise, but said nothing.

We aimed for Stockholm, but we only got as far as Brussels.

Mama breathed heavily on the hard-upholstered seat, her face pinched. We had to change trains in Brussels, and while waiting in the station, Raoul and I watched in horror as her drawn, gasping face changed from white to blue. She lay on the hard wooden bench sweating, her legs swelling alarmingly. Two porters from the station carried her to a rooming house nearby. The physician came and pronounced her too ill to move.

It was her heart, the physician said. There was nothing he could do. Just make her comfortable.

Raoul took a bachelor's room upstairs, and he engaged two comfortable rooms down below for Mama and I. He mentioned a nurse, and at first I protested, how would he manage the expense? Sadly he pointed out that he had his whole portion of inheritance from his father – had I forgotten that? Further, as soon as he was cleared once and for all of Philippe's murder, he would inherit from Philippe as well. He said this so sadly, it shamed me to have asked.

For three weeks we sat together in those rooms where I sponged her face, cleaned her body, and listened to the incoherent mumbles that slowly drifted off into rattling, restless sleep. Raoul left only to return to his room to slumber, and I shared the wide bed with Mama. Even the wet sheets, her thrashing, and her clawing for air couldn't break through my exhaustion. In some ways, it was more of a tomb than even Erik's rooms beneath the Opera Garnier, a tomb not of the dead but of the suffering and dying.

One night she drifted in and out of consciousness. I begged Raoul to stay, and after the nurse arrived, he agreed. Then Mama woke and cried for me. With the nurse resting on a small cot, I crawled into bed with Mama and held her until she slipped into sleep. Through the long watches of the night Raoul tossed and turned on the narrow divan in the tiny parlor, his legs draped over the edge. In the darkness he sobbed for Philippe like a child, calling his name over and over, lashing himself with blame.

When I couldn't bear the whip of Philippe's memory across my back any longer, I crept out of bed. Crouching next to him on the floor, because the divan was too narrow for both of us, I put my arms around him and kissed his wet cheeks. After a few minutes he pushed me away, saying without sarcasm, "Go back to the bedroom, Christine. You may be a widow, but you must still think of your virtue."

Such as it is, I thought bitterly.

It was past midnight on one of those long vigils when Raoul stood quietly at the bedroom door, listening to Mama's rattling gasps for breath. He said that it was time to fetch the priest, and he was right. The nurse was sent away and soon returned with a young one, scarcely older than Raoul. His nervous, tentative manner showed that he lacked experience with the dying. By the time he draped his purple embroidered stole around his narrow shoulders, she was deeply unconscious. He anointed her barely breathing form with oil, touching her head and hands and feet, absolved her, and put a tiny fragment of the Eucharist into her mouth as "bread for the journey."

Don't be afraid, I said to him silently as he stumbled through the prayers. If this deathbed pales you, how would you have endured the one I attended, and the confession which I heard? You give the _viaticum_ to a woman whose soul was pink and sweet as a newly picked peach, whose mind was beyond any capacity for sin. But who is there to unburden me of what weighs down my soul? Would you like to hear the confession I carry around with me, tender and innocent _cure_, a confession of sins not my own, but embroidered onto my soul with threads of blood?

The priest left, and Mama died with the first light of morning.

After the funeral Mass we sat in a café over cups of steaming coffee unrelieved by bread or cakes, unspeaking, afraid to ask each other what came next. The first lunch customers arrived, so the waitress stopped occasionally to look daggers at us. I told Raoul I was too ill to eat anything, and it was true. Food before noon brought the bile up to my throat and I could bear nothing but coffee or tea. The cozy, warm restaurant glowed with blue checkered tablecloths and the late morning sun. I fingered a corner of ours, admiring the heavy linen. In comparison I felt cheap, like a kept woman who couldn't keep up her end of the bargain.

Finally I said to him, "Do you want to return to Paris? We can cash in the tickets for our passage to Stockholm, and there's Mama's ticket as well."

His shoulders bent around a face bleak with tiredness. "Paris has nothing for me anymore, and I would hope it holds nothing for you as well." He drew a letter from his pocket. "This arrived early today, before we left for Mass. I read it while you were getting ready, and I'd like you to see it too."

Trembling, I picked up the thick paper, embossed with Raoul's family's seal. Out of it came a single handwritten page, and a frighteningly official document with seal, dominated by several thick, flourishing signatures. The words "accidental drowning," "no malfeasance," "Raoul Jean-Marie de Chagny," "signs of strangulation or asphyxiation absent," "no charges recommended," all rolled past my blurred eyes. Wiping away tears, I read on. "You're cleared," I stammered.

"Yes," he said. "But there was no justice done here."

"I don't understand," I replied. "Did you want them to indict you? The one who did this made a career of contriving murders to look like accidents. I don't see how you could have hoped for anything better."

He put his head in his hands for a moment, then looked sadly at me. "The one who did this has his reward."

I thought of Erik's whispered words that trailed off and then hoisted themselves up with renewed vigor, each a recitation of a monstrous act. I would never tell Raoul what he had said, never. How do priests bear it, I asked myself, and nothing answered me.

"This is wonderful news. It's as if you have your life back, or part of it anyway," I added, as his shoulders continued to droop. "Do you want me to read the letter as well?"

"Go ahead," he said dejectedly. "If you are to be my wife, you need to know what vipers slither around the base of the family tree."

"He calls the judge of inquiry an incompetent baboon, a political hack, and the doctors who came to testify are 'barber surgeons' and 'blood-letters.' Is he a doctor himself, who knows medicine?"

"They were incompetent, Christine, in that they couldn't determine that Philippe was murdered."

I didn't know what to say to that.

Raoul managed a small snort, the most humor in weeks. "Uncle Auguste hates doctors, all men of science, actually. He says that they are setting themselves up as a false aristocracy, in deadly opposition to the true aristocrats."

"And who might those be?" I asked, rankling.

"Why himself and our family, for one thing. He mouths allegiance to the republic, but secretly I suspect he keeps a shrine to Napoleon III in some untraveled niche in that drafty mausoleum he calls a home, and lights a candle to it every evening. He probably celebrates his death anniversary as a feast day."

He laughed, so I did, too. Then he took my ungloved hand, his face boyish but his manner grave again, the momentary sunburst obscured by cloud. "There's something I have to tell you, Christine."

The nausea had retreated but now it attacked, firing a cannon of sickness up my throat. I took a sip of cold coffee and waited. Now it's coming, I thought. He's free and clear, no fear of arrest. He has his father's estate, and there will be Philippe's, too. He's of age, so even Auguste de Chagny can't touch his money or property. This is when he tells me that he's changed his mind, that he's leaving me. What does he need a cuckoo-fouled nest for, anyway? If there is a child, its father killed his brother. He says he'll be fair, but how could he look on it with anything other than hatred?

Just don' t let me cry or faint in front of all these people.

Raoul twisted his napkin a few times through the wooden ring. Go on, get it over with, I wanted to scream. He cleared his throat a few times, smoothed his silky reddish mustache, and finally said, "I'm going to renounce my title."

Stunned, I said nothing. Worry creased his face as he went on, "I had hoped it didn't matter to you. But I can't live that life any more. I've turned it over again and again in my thoughts, Christine. To my death I'll be convinced that Erik strangled my brother. Yet why did my brother die? It wasn't to save me from danger. It was to keep me from going after you."

"Raoul, that isn't fair to his memory," I said quietly. "He knew you had headed down to find me. He wanted to rescue you."

He took my hand gently. "You didn't hear him the night before, Christine. I thought he would collapse from apoplexy, with that purple face. His sole mission was to dissuade me from a marriage to you, because it 'diminished the nobility,' as he put it. Marrying you would 'taint the family heritage.' It was foul, and it went on and on."

The waitress at this moment interrupted us with a glare. "Would Monsieur like to order lunch? As you can see, our tables are filling rapidly."

"_Potage St-Germain_ for two, if you please," he said in a clipped authoritative tone. "And some of those soft rolls." Then he turned back to me, intently. "Please know that I will keep you comfortable in every way. I do not intend to take a vow of poverty, or make every day but Sunday a fast-day. Nonetheless, this course is set out before me, and follow it I must. If you want the life of a high-flown lady, I will not, no, I cannot provide it. My conscience will not allow me."

Relief like hunger opened up in me. "You thought I would want you for your title, for your position? I'm a farm girl, Raoul. One of my earliest memories is of my father spreading manure, and my mother helping him. They were coated in the stuff. I never wanted your title, despite what Philippe thought. I'm glad to hear it, actually."

Together we sat quietly, waiting for food. "It means no 'seasons,' no receptions, no elaborate parties, no landau to ride around in so as to show off the latest fashions."

"You never wanted those in the first place," I remarked. "Neither did I. How many parties or balls did I attend when I sang at the Garnier? Save for the Masked Ball, practically none. Receptions and jewels and summers in Switzerland are not why I am here with you, now."

The soup came, green and savory, fragrant with leeks.

"There's something else, too," he said tentatively. "I want you to give up life on the stage."

I laughed, and the couple next to us looked up questioningly. "You raced me to the finish line. I wanted to tell you that I was through with the theater life for good, and feared what you'd say. Take me as far away from it as possible please, Monsieur de Chagny."

"Not Monsieur le Vicomte," he mused, "but Monsieur. I like it. It will do."

"Your family will think you mad."

"No doubt, although I haven't heard recently of anyone being locked up as a lunatic for wanting to live a simpler life."

"It's a relief to me," I said. "I can manage servants, and run a household, but I seriously wondered how I would live the life of nobility."

Softly he said, "I am glad we are in agreement." Then abashed, he asked, "Have there been any signs? Other than the obvious, I mean?"

"No," I said. "Perhaps it's too soon. We might have to wait another month or two. I don't want to you to be saddled with me unless we know, until we're sure. That way, if nothing's happened, you can go back to Paris and rejoin your family. I can find work here. You're not bound to me." I spoke bravely but gagged down my sickness, terrified that he might leave me alone in Brussels.

Abject, flushed, with lower lip set he said quietly, "What have I been saying to you? Perhaps I have not made myself plain enough, as you still seem to think that I might abandon you. Do you think that what you did under duress would make me stop loving you? There was a newspaper account last week, I didn't mention it for fear that it would upset you, but I must tell you now. A French girl, the daughter of a collector of antiquities excavating in Northern Africa, was kidnapped in Tunisia and imprisoned for several months in a harem. A few well-placed cannon shots and she was rescued. But she was engaged, and both the girl and her family fully expected her fiance to abandon her."

He paused. "What happened?" I asked.

"They were married the Saturday before Ash Wednesday."

I lowered my eyes. "Do you think he would have married her, had there been a child?"

"If it mattered to that man, it's of no importance to me. How many ways, in what kind of plain language do I have to tell you?" He lowered his voice, so not to embarrass me in front of the curious onlookers, straining to have their lunch spiced by our conversation. "I don't care what happens next month, or the month after that. Others may blame innocents for the sins of the fathers. I do not. Do you have your papers, the ones I told you to get before we left Paris?"

I nodded, dazed, and he said, "As for the rest … I'm not going to wait any longer. We waited once, and look what happened. Today we buy a ring. Tomorrow we go to the registry office and file for the posting of the banns."

"You mean it," I whispered. "After all that's happened, you mean it."

"I have something else for you too," he said, pulling a little package out of his pocket. "I meant to give this to you when we arrived in Stockholm, but Mme. Valerius's illness drove it entirely out of my mind. It was my mother's," and he opened the tiny velvet pouch to reveal an old pearl ring, the band so thin that it might have been almost worn through. I stared, afraid to pick it up or touch it. The buffed and pinkish pearl was almost as wide as the nail of my little finger.

"It will take some time for the marriage paperwork," he said, "and I want you to feel really engaged. To finally believe me."

When he slipped the ring onto my finger, two men raised their beer glasses and called out, "Give her a kiss!"

Looking around, I fixed the shabby little restaurant with its yellow painted walls and blue-checked tablecloths into my heart.

We stopped at the first jewelers' shop we came to on the boulevard. "Two rings in one day," I remarked. When the jeweler fit the woven golden eternity band onto my finger, I dropped a few tears onto the glass counter top. The old jeweler pushed his black velvet skullcap around, perhaps from embarrassment. Raoul wiped my face with his handkerchief, then took the wedding ring and put it securely in his vest pocket, snug and warm against his heart. The pearl gleamed pinkly on my finger, and the jeweler admired it. "Fine work," he said.

"Why did you cry?" Raoul asked, as we left the little shop with its fiercely glittering display window.

"Because it won't fall off," I said. "Because it fit."

_continued.._.


	4. Wedding Hymn

**Wedding Hymn**

Early in the mornings I come down into the parlor to embroider little frocks for Martine's girls. The east light filters through the tall windows of the long wall, making light bright enough to see tiny stitches more easily.

I sit near the window and gather a little fabric together in a pleat, then embroider flowers to hold the pleats together. Row after row of those little folds across the front make smocking, so pretty beneath a pert little chin. Martine always complains she doesn't have time to do it.

Last night I dreamt. I sat sewing in the parlor while silvery white winter sunlight fell over me like a flood. Never had the stitches been so clear or my fingers so nimble. A fire burned merrily, and the little figures on the blue-and-white Delft fireplace tiles danced along with it. In the dream came a deep sense of peace, of ease. The only thing missing was Raoul, missing like a tooth gone from the mouth. With the strange logic of dreams the children were still little instead of grown, but they were someplace else, I didn't know where.

Silk rustled across wood. Someone had lifted the scarf from the piano, and with a scrape pulled the bench out. I turned slowly, expecting to see the maid. Didn't she know better than to disturb my sewing? My gaze swept slowly across the room bright with morning. Something squeezed my heart like a small bird in the hunter's hand.

Erik sat at the piano bench motionless, long and impossibly lean, dark in his samite mask.

We looked at each other for a long time, the skewed time of dreams where you can play out a whole adventure in less than five minutes of sleep, or take hours to walk down a boulevard of shifting sand.

"You left the window closed," he said, faintly accusatory.

Then he broke away, put his hands to the keyboard, and played something I'd never heard before. Its long plangent chords collided with each other over intervals of seconds and sevenths and elevenths. Nothing fit, nothing came to any climax, nothing worked, yet the passages rolled on impossibly beautiful, irresolutely sad.

I stood in the middle of the room as he played, my sewing dangling useless in my hand. When he stopped, he turned to me and said petulantly, "In the time since you shut the window, they've been writing books about me, and I find it most irritating." He waited for me to say something. Instead, I stared at the long patches of black hair which swept down uncut over the back of his head like stray shadowy flowers knocked down by rain. One such lock had in it a long streak of silver. I wasn't afraid of him, only mildly irritated that he appeared in my parlor as bold as you please.

"What do they say in those books?" I asked.

"They deny me love. Everyone denies me love, when all I wanted was to found a household for myself, like any other man. They refuse me the simplest delights of the flesh, the most basic metrical elements of Hymen's song. They make me burn like fire with no relief, as if that blessed agony were reducible to lust, the lust that any brothel girl or one's own hand could satisfy. The incessant nattering of women twists me right and left, made worse when enlarged through the lens of the printing press. Had I truly been lashed with the passions they inflict upon me, I would have gone mad, and what's worse, I would have gotten no work done at all. That's one reason I loved you, Christine, you never blathered without ceasing. This monstrous regiment frustrates me endlessly, and then expresses astonishment when I act like a monster."

"How unfair," I smiled, because in the middle of this most lucid dream, I had not the faintest idea of which books he spoke. "You did go mad, you know."

"Will you lie with me?" he asked abruptly. He stood up from the piano bench and his shoulders filled the room. "I'm tired of dangling like a puppet at the end of their stories. I want my own."

I laughed and then he did too, laughter like light metal cymbals which make a bright sharp sound. "Back in our days together, I would have killed you for that laughter," he finally said in a cool conversational tone.

"True," I said, "but everything's different now."

He kicked his feet against the piano bench impatiently, twitching for an answer.

Finally I said, "I'm old, Erik. I'm ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago."

I waited, but he didn't recognize the passage. Apparently he was not familiar with the works of the Scottish writer James Barrie.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "I'm old as well, ever so much more than you."

In dreams the utterly improbable is commonplace. "I will lie with you," I said. "But you have to wait here for a moment. I have to go look at the garden first."

Outside, the lush beds had all grown up with weeds and brambles, the hedges overgrew the paths, and the pond was full of algal sludge. I stared into this rioting green chaos. It's because Raoul's not here, I thought. He always kept the gardeners at their tasks. Then I regretted my glib agreement. If Raoul had been here, Erik wouldn't have come. I wouldn't have made such a stupid promise. Now Raoul is gone, and what is to keep Erik from coming back?

I could run away, I thought. But I told him I would lie with him, and when something uncanny appears out of nowhere in your house, you don't go back on your word. Besides, it might not be so bad now. Just go and see. Behind the walls of the house I could feel Erik waiting for me, his hunger drawing me back inside. When I put my hand on the brass doorknob to go to him, I awoke, aching with hunger of my own.

The bed next to me was empty, empty as it had been these past months. I cried for awhile. It didn't fill the bed with a large man with round warm limbs.

Downstairs I came to the parlor, empty in the lavender dawn. Half in dream, I sat down at the piano for a long time, but couldn't bring myself to touch the keys. I can fade away like Mrs. Darling, I thought, and become "dead and forgotten." Or I can go back out into the garden, search among the brambles, and find what I was looking for last night, find what's grown since Raoul hasn't been here to prune the hedges.

I opened one of the parlor windows, so that its sheer white lawn curtain flowed back and forth with the breeze.

oooooooooooooooooooo

Raoul and I took our portfolio filled with proof of births and deaths to the office of the registrar. In a high-ceilinged room dusty with books, a pale bored clerk stamped each one. He sat at a high desk, in a precarious chair that makes even a tall man look undignified when he must clamber up and down. Raoul's pile was far larger than mine. I had merely my lonely article of birth written in both Swedish and French, signed by the embassy officials in Paris. On the other side of the desk, all Raoul's departed family had gathered that day to give solemn if disapproving witness.

The clerk meticulously arranged them by date of death. First came Raoul's father's parents, followed by his mother, who in middle age died bringing him into the world. Then his mother's parents blotted out their daughter as the clerk laid their articles on top of hers. Last came his father, dead of apoplexy when Raoul was twelve. So many people moved from this life into moldy earth, the traces of their passage recorded in embossed parchment. Only Philippe was exiled from the pile of death notices shuffled by the sallow man. Raoul had reached his majority more than a summer ago, and thus no longer needed the protection of a guardian. Philippe's article of death wasn't needed.

"All pending the court's review," the clerk answered when Raoul asked him about the posting of the banns.

Dust danced in the long slants of late afternoon light. I felt a little faint, and sat down on a hard wooden chair. Raoul stood alone, watching the clerk fill out applications. Though his back was straight and his form strong and full, some invisible weight made his face sag and his mustache droop. He slumped a little under the weight of all that solitude, the only surviving man in his family under the age of sixty.

_Little one_, I said to the possible child in my womb, or perhaps to no one at all, _if you're there, hear me. Whether you like it or not all this history will come down on your shoulders. Two strains of history, actually, the history everyone can see, and the history no one will ever see. But I promise you this. When it comes time for you to marry, never will you stand alone in a cold office smelling of coal-dust, requiring the review of the court in lieu of a signature. If you want the one you love, even if she is poor, you shall have her. _

Raoul said something to the clerk, who frowned and shook his head. Raoul insisted, and the clerk went over to consult a large black-bound leather book. Impatiently he shifted when the clerk was out of sight, but returned to perfect attention when the thin, pale man came back. I grew a little afraid, was something wrong? Then came the signing of the receipts, more stamps, and at a signal from Raoul, I rose unsteadily to my feet.

"How's the sickness?" he asked on the way down the wide granite stairs to the boulevard below.

"Worse," I admitted, "but it's not like you thought. The physician says I'm perfectly healthy," and he looked relieved.

We walked back to our block of flats in silence, my arm on Raoul's. I had visited a doctor that morning, a short, fat Dutchman who almost laughed when I asked him if I was ill. "Innocent angel, it's the way of women when they're with child," he had said. I argued with him, saying there was still time for my "friend in the red dress" to make her visit, or that perhaps some illness had caused both afflictions. Was there some medication he could give me to relieve me? Then he looked hard at the pearl ring, and his face lost its wide geniality. He said he was a simple man, a devout man, and under no circumstances could he countenance what my suggestion implied.

I had looked blankly at him, not knowing what he meant. Irritated, he stated flatly, "You're not married." The wedding would be soon, I answered, and then demanded, was I ill or not? If I wasn't, there was no need for medicine. His plump shoulders relaxed a bit. In came his nurse, a tall flat ironing-board of a woman, and under her impersonal glare he examined me, pressing hard into my stomach from all directions. Once I cried out, and he grunted, pressing on more. He even dug his fingers into the hollows all around my hips and lower back, as if measuring me, and his grunts grew more approving as his probes grew deeper and more painful.

"You're not ill," he said, finally. "But you're unmarried, and not a virgin, true?" I whispered yes, it was true, hating to reveal anything to that flat sphinx-like nurse. "No medicine needed, Mlle. Daae. Come back and see me again next month if your lady friend in red still avoids your company. For that matter, come back in a month anyway, friend or not.

"You say you're getting married soon, that's good. For such a slim little thing, you're surprisingly roomy. The ischial spines are perfectly splayed. There's no sign of any pelvic constriction, no rachitis, no triradiate pelvis or tubercular signs at all. I wouldn't fear any difficulties." He might as well have been speaking dog Latin. When I shook my head in confusion, he just said not to worry about my health, and for heaven's sake, get that young man of mine to marry me quickly. I didn't tell Raoul, however, thinking it would confuse him as much as it confused me. In any event, I wasn't ill, and had no horrible potions or pills to swallow.

A few weeks passed. Raoul put away his fine tailored garments and wore his black frock coat everywhere. When I teased him, saying that he looked like a Lutheran minister from my the country of my childhood, he only smiled.

Without rehearsals or performances for myself, or the theater, supper-clubs, or cabaret for Raoul, evenings were long. Mama Valerius was gone, so he would not stay with me in the evening in my flat. I only saw his small room when I passed by. He never invited me into it.

But our balconies were above one another. I stood on mine, he on his, and when the evenings were warm enough for a coat or shawl, we quietly talked. Our windows faced the courtyard rather than the street, and one night I asked him, "Shall we plant sweetpeas and rose bushes in the spring?"

"It won't take that long, Gerda," he answered.

"I hope not, Kay," I said in return, and all these years later, I hold that evening close to my breast out of so many others.

During the days, we walked, and I learned the strength and curve of his arm as well as my own as I leaned on it. Boots were cheaper than carriage rides, and leather soles were cheaper than new boots. On Sundays we treated ourselves to a short train ride outside the city, and spent the day roaming the green-budded countryside. We ate our sweet rolls in the chilly weather, glad for the absence of bees. Raoul rested his head in my lap and I kissed the flakes of sugar off his mustache. We had traded the wild red rocks and pounding surf of Bretagne for rolling fields and orchards only faintly dusted with green. I could almost imagine us children again, when we explored hand in hand, breathless with exhilaration.

The banns were posted and remained unchallenged. With the certificate of marriage in hand, we went to see the young priest who had ushered Mama Valerius out of this world. He heard our confessions, and in a little side chapel of the great Gothic edifice heard our vows.

On a dim green street we found clean furnished rooms with worn but sturdy furniture. The concierge looked at the new ring on my finger and smiled, but as I climbed the stairs, my heart pounded with fear for the night that was to come.

Raoul carried our carpet bags upstairs and hung up our coats. In an old copper kettle I made tea, and as evening fell blue over Brussels we ate our simple wedding supper, topped off with a little seedcake presented to us by the concierge.

I closed the dark green velvet curtains and looked apprehensively at the high mattress in its four-poster frame. Someone had embroidered crewelwork paisley patterns over the pale muslin bed curtains.

A long-ago labor of love, their once-bright reds and blues had faded into palest pastel. In the velveteen chair next to the bed I sank, not knowing what to do next. Raoul knelt down next to me and gently stroked my shoulders, my neck, my arms, as I shook with tension.

"Perhaps we should have gone away somewhere," he said, a tremble in his voice.

"We are away already, when you think about it."

"There are worse places to honeymoon than Brussels," he said with a hesitant glance at my middle. "Should we? If there is a child, will it be dangerous?"

"I don't think so," I replied. "Most women don't even know until they're well along. If it did hurt, I don't know how any babies would get born at all."

He nuzzled my neck in reply, torn apart as I was between two opposing armies. One pulled me toward my husband, my living husband, and the other pulled me mockingly toward the grave, saying, you know the depravity of which you are capable. You know the depths to which you can sink. How can you hide that from your live husband?

"It will be all right," I said, finally, and he blew out the lamp. Blue light from a full moon suffused the room. Its glimmer was punctuated by shadows from the pointed roofs outside.

He sat next to me on the bed, neither of us knowing where to put our hands. Shyly we kissed, and he undid his vest, then took my hand and slid it around the curve of his side. I looked at his face with a little anxiety. This probably wasn't what he expected for his wedding night, this trampled flowerbed of virginity. Yet he looked happy, and when my hand rested on his thigh, he sighed deeply.

I didn't want him to know how deep my excitement went. Opening my mouth softly with his, he kissed at first tenderly, then a little harder, playing with his lips over my mouth and tickling my upper lift with his soft mustache. My dress felt like a suit of armor. He fumbled with the tiny nubbins that held it together, brows ridged with concentration. It took a long time to get the dress off.

"I should hang it up," I said, and he let me go. I tied the bed curtains back, pursued by little eye caresses as he watched. My dress drooped like a coat of mail discarded when the awaited battle was never fought. An unfamiliar feeling of happiness played over me. He wants me, I thought. He doesn't think I'm spoiled, or disgusting. He tried hard not to look at my body, but when I unlaced my corset, look he did.

"I thought you would need a lady's maid," he said.

"It's clever, I can undo it on the side."

Then, standing shivering in my cotton shift and the long black stockings I'd forgotten to roll down, I whispered, "'Take me to bed."

It was only later that I thought, perhaps I might have shocked him. Perhaps he thought my behavior more worthy of a whore than a decent wife. But when you come back from the dead, you don't care if you're thought a whore or not.

Flushed and heavy with desire, he picked me up in his arms and laid me gently on the bed. Then he closed the bed curtains and left to undo flaps and buttons. With flaming face he came through the veil of curtain naked save for the long undergarment hanging off his hips. The curtains shone faintly blue with the moon, and it was dim in the bed's cave.

Hiding his arousal with his hands, he slid into bed under the sheet and lay quietly next to me. I didn't know whether he was too considerate or too frightened to touch me. I waited for him to leap up, to pounce, but he only held out his arms. Over to him I slid, braced against the inevitable rough pressure of his will. Fear made me shiver like a cat out in the rain. No pounce came. Softly he opened his mouth, inviting me into a kiss.

"Is it all right?" I asked softly, when we broke for breath. His skin was a warm bath I could drown in.

"Unbelievable," he murmured.

"You love me? You want me?"

"Oh, yes," he breathed. "How I love you."

He rolled my stockings down, first one, then the other. When he reached for my chemise I hesitated, and so he let it go, then kissed me again. "I'm sorry," I said. "It's just that I'm frightened."

"Of what?"

"Of being hurt."

"Oh, Christine," he said, the faint gleam of a sword in his voice, "did he hurt you? I will not, I promise. I will be the soul of gentleness."

"I don't know what to do, what's right, what's wrong." What I didn't say was how I feared he would discover that ugly thing in me, that blot which made me wonder how I could ever be a good wife to him.

"Just love me," he said. "That's what's right. Look, here's my heart," and he put my hand on his warm breast.

"My love," I said, over and over. In answer he pulled my hand against the sparse fur of his chest, to stroke over the rest of him all yielding.

"Go ahead, it's all right," he said, as quietly he lay like putty underneath my roving palms. He unbuttoned his undergarment and pulled it down over his hips and straining sex. There he lay with moonlight gleaming on his round and silky limbs, trembling and roused for me.

I waited for him to grab and take me. Surprisingly, he rolled over onto his back and lightly touched my hips, guiding me over towards him with a suggestion rather than a tug. I followed him still a little fearful, but more trusting now, and curious.

"Ride me," he whispered. "Ride me like a horse." I didn't understand what he meant at first. He stroked and pulled my hips reassuringly, and then I knew. Over his hips I threw my leg, and rested atop that part which all sons of Adam share, he and Erik alike. I waited for him to shove inside me, to yank me down, but he remained entirely still.

The tiniest movements sometimes have the greatest effects. At the outer grasping softness he throbbed. Up and down my legs he stroked without force. I had all the time in world to make my descent. A long lick of delight went up through me as I slowly lowered myself down. Clasping him, I worked muscles I had never used on a man. He groaned and arched his back a little, and that was all.

"Are you all right?" he said drowsily, afterwards. "There was no pain?"

"None," I said, looking at his sleep-dusted face. I never understood what instinct led him to know exactly what to do on that night, and on so many after. Never could I ask. Somehow he knew. He took my hand, drew it to his face to plant a few kisses, then slept. Sometime later, I did too.

Night after night the moon waned to black, then waxed fat again over the rooftops. Night after night I flowed down onto the full expanse of him, the skin of his stomach soft under mine, the large muscles beneath tensed with anticipation. I pressed up close with the tiniest of movements and mewling cries, while underneath me he shook with desire until he could hold off no longer.

I knew what I sought, and after some time even had some idea how to obtain it. One night I drew him into me with greater strength and urgency than ever before, and he gently placed his hands on my hips to slow me down. Every tremble, every shiver lifted me to a new layer of fluttering, gathering expectation. When finally he did move, he lunged into me in spite of himself. Then my cup full of desire spilled, and I gripped him, flung myself on him, cried out to him over and again. Over and around him I closed and opened, opened and closed without control.

The wave of his own desire broke against me. He swelled up hot, moving rhythmically without thought. Deep he sank, caressed by that invisible hand beyond reach of mind or will, face slack with pleasure. Onto his breast he drew me, gleaming with well-being, breathing hard as the quivers faded. "I've heard of that," he whispered. "I had no idea."

At first I didn't know what he was talking about.

"Men speak about it only with regard to their mistresses," he said, "not with good women. Not with their wives."

"I'm not a good woman," I said. "Are you sorry that you made me so happy?"

He pressed my head deeper into his breast. "How can I be sorry? I never knew a man could give a woman such pleasure."

"I didn't know, either," I said, and he sighed as he rocked me on his yielding chest.

"Thank you," he said after a long moment. "Thank you for telling me that."

"Let me look at you," I whispered. A full moon, waxed fat again a month after our wedding, cast its broken shadows around our bed. He nodded, half asleep, so I studied him intently. His sword slept all lax and sheathed in its long scabbard of flesh, slick with moisture. I glowed like a coal-fire, and could still feel the tender echo of his body inside mine.

He was a man, and so was Erik, sons of Adam both. I passed my hand like a blessing over those parts they shared in common. And thus from moon to moon Raoul and I became one flesh, because Erik was dead.

(_continued..._)


	5. Ischial Spines

**Ischial Spines**

**A/N:** _The ischial spines form the narrowest part of the female human pelvis. More space between the ischial spines makes it easier to give birth._

I wasn't the only one who had been resurrected. Raoul had travelled to the land of the dead and survived, too. No one comes back from that realm unchanged. If all Lazarus had to fear was dying again, what threat was that? We who died didn't dread to repeat the experience – or so I thought.

Spring turned slowly to summer in Belgium in 1881. Almost two months had passed since our quiet wedding, four since I crawled from the tomb like a dead woman walking. The heated letters between Raoul and his family flew from Brussels to Paris and back again. Those from his sisters Raoul let me read. Martyniere was especially kind, even though she asked me not to write her in return, as her husband inspected all her letters. Those from his uncle he took into our bedroom to read himself, then sat quietly with his head in his hands, saying nothing.

While engaged in a lawsuit to hamper Raoul's inheritance claims, the Comte Auguste de Chagny graciously condescended to send money. Raoul extracted the franc notes and gave them to the St. Vincent de Paul Society. After leaving the letters on his desk for a few days, perhaps hoping they would metamorphose into something more benign that he could share with me, he burned them in the coal fire.

Mostly we waited in that summer between worlds. Raoul found half a house for us to rent on our elm-lined street, with a shared garden in the back. In the other half lived a widow who flushed and giggled when Raoul bent over to kiss her hand, accidentally grazing it with his mustache. It was easier to renounce a title than the mannerisms.

For Raoul, gone were the days of a box at the Opera or afternoons at the racetrack, where Philippe had lost more money on one race than Auguste had sent us that whole spring. Raoul had brought several suits of evening dress with him from Paris, but sold all save the plainest of the entire ensemble. The diamond tie-stud and cufflinks he kept, as they had belonged to his father.

One late June day we stopped at a stall for a treat, a few chocolate-covered hazelnuts for each of us. I almost dropped mine, for as I stood on the sunshine-drenched sidewalk, I felt the little life leap inside of me, and knew with certainty what I had long suspected. I didn't tell Raoul that day, nor in the days after. I wanted him in our bed, and was afraid that if a child was a certainty, he would leave it.

In the night the child in my womb danced as my husband danced within my body. When my pulsing flesh gripped Raoul in return, the three of us moved together until the little shocks fluttered away, one by one. Before he began to snore, I murmured, "I want to show you something." His hand rested heavily where my plump belly curved above the shadowed delta. "Press here," I said softly, and there it came again, the faint sloshing movement followed by a tap, just a tiny pressure, and then a stronger kick. He must have felt it too, because the muscles in his hand jerked slightly, as if that miniscule touch burned him.

"Can you love him?" I asked, frightened of the answer, frightened not to ask.

"He's part of you," he said as he caressed my stomach no longer flat and ridged with muscle, but instead buttery soft. "I will try."

The widow next door stopped me early one morning as I went out for bread. "It looks like a little stranger is coming to stay with you," she said indulgently. "But your husband should stop making you do all that walking. In your condition, you need your rest." What a silly woman, I thought. Everyone knows that walking makes a baby strong, and helps him drop down just right so to be born easily. In the Skotelof of my childhood, women worked in the gardens or fields, and milked the cows until the onset of their pains, as did my own mother.

"Have you started your layette?" she asked. I hadn't, and shook my head. She laughed indulgently, young mothers, how they needed shepherding. Her daughter was a seamstress, she said, and would come over to help me sew one. I would need white cotton flannel, and lots of it, as well as yarn for hats, sweaters, blankets.

"I'd like her to come over," I said presently, and Raoul came home every day to two women laughing, cutting, pinning, and sewing reams of the white stuff. I was glad for her company, as Raoul had decided to pursue a profession, much to Auguste de Chagny's vehemently expressed disgust. Every day Raoul went to the law library and read for the bar examination, especially in the areas of patent and maritime law. When he could read no more, he went to the law office founded by a transplant from Paris like ourselves, one who had known Philippe from his own naval stint under the Second Empire, and who let Raoul assist with cases.

"You'll need towels," the widow's daughter said. She herself had borne two children so far. "And nightgowns that open down the front, way down. You don't want anything standing in between baby and his breakfast, eh?"

That made me blush. Of course a baby must have the breast, how else would he eat? The enormity of all this crept up on me, day by day, and one afternoon Raoul came into the sewing room to find me sobbing uncontrollably, a little nightshirt on the floor with a needle sticking through it, unthreaded because of my tears. "Are you sick?" he cried. "Do you need the doctor?"

"It's just all so much," I repeated. "How do women do it?"

He held me, his face serious and unsmiling, rocking me back and forth on his broad full chest. Raoul's mother had died giving birth. I didn't have to ask to know that he feared the same for me. "How do you feel?" he asked.

"The sickness is gone. It's been days since I've had it. Raoul, I don't feel badly at all. In fact, I feel better than I have in months. But the littlest thing comes to mind, and I melt into tears."

"What littlest thing came to your mind this time?" he asked, all warm male concern.

I picked up my sewing. "This layette, for one. I don't know how I'm to get it all done."

He laughed at such a small worry. "That's easy. No doubt your seamstress has a friend. Three women sewing will finish everything faster than two. Ask her tomorrow."

"I thought we weren't going to live like nobility, and here we are, relying on servants."

"The nobility aren't the only ones with servants. You had a maid in Paris, did you not? We pay our servants a fair wage and treat them with dignity. It's their employment, after all. Were we not to do it, how would they live? Come now, perhaps there's something else bothering you. What is it, won't you tell me?"

My tears weren't really for the layette that day. Something darker burrowed inside me, something I didn't want to tell him. With each little kick, I caught a nightmare glimpse of Erik's face, shrunken and stuck onto that of a tiny baby's, a little monkey of terror. "It's nothing," I said, letting him hold me, feeling like a liar of the worst sort.

He didn't leave my bed, even with the certainty of a child. The summer evenings were cool and overcast, without the suffocating heat of Paris that drove so many from that city. Winds from the sea blew away the summer stench of sewers. Together in the long twilights we studied Dutch, or "Flemish" as they called it here. Some of the French in Brussels acted as if neither Flanders nor the language existed, but Raoul insisted we learn it. When the evenings grew cool and dark, we extinguished the lamps, kept the bedcurtains open for the breeze, sometimes lazily made love, sometimes not.

The ladies' magazines said that being with child "calmed" women and "damped the fires of passion," but that experience was not mine. The fears I'd forgotten in the first flush of our sweet moon of love came back, that inside of me rested something depraved, something more of Lilith than of Eve. For now I not only accepted the pleasure dispensed by my husband's body; I grew to desire it. As my body softened and spread, as my breasts swelled and grew increasingly tender, he also gravitated towards me.

"More flesh is so becoming on you," he said, rubbing his face over my bosom. "Like beautiful white marble, but soft."

No longer did Raoul need to lie passively quiet for fear that I might shrink from or fear him. One night we lay like two spoons fitted together perfectly in the drawer. Around my fattening stomach his hand moved, then up to my breasts to tweak and tease, until a tiny drop or two of moisture garnished the tip. Then from behind he slid into me, slowly at first, then with increasingly wild abandon, so that our cries rang out together against the backdrop of the dark.

Inside my ocean the little one swirled and swam and grew. Now when Raoul rested his hand on the shore to feel the waves and flips of little arms or legs, those delicate movements waxed stronger by the week. But as Raoul pressed his hand down into the spot where the quickening was most apparent, as he took greater delight in pressing in one spot and feeling a kick in another, I grew quieter and more apprehensive. What if my child's face resembled his father's?

The flush of middle pregnancy, the calm sleepy swelling that brought with it relaxation and well-being was over. Now I expanded at an alarming rate, and the former pleasant pressure on my hips and thighs turned to an almost intolerable weight, a grating downward force from which there was no relief. Gone were the nights when after long bouts of love I slept deeply as an odalisque on her silk cushions. I tossed and turned, but no pillows or even Raoul's body could comfort me, as I woke every few hours only to thrash again.

Sometimes when he reached for me in love I snapped or snarled, which made him retreat in confusion, deeply hurt. The next night was punctuated by lust. Even with my enormous stomach, I lay on my side and lifted my leg for him, and we came together like scissors. Afterwards he would embrace and nuzzle me, only to find me gone to the other side of the bed, clutching my burden, shaking with anxiety, wanting to be held, wanting to be left alone.

"I don't know you anymore," he whispered sadly one night, after I pulled away from him, my body still pulsing.

"I don't know myself, either," I choked back, hating how I hurt him, hating him for his unchanged flesh, his mobility, the unencumbered freedom of the male animal.

No matter how many times I snapped, he always drew me back, his voice gentle. "It reminds me of Father's bitches, the hunting hounds. When one would get close to whelping, there was nothing to be done with her except give her a quiet place to rest, and leave her alone. Even the gentlest dog would take a finger off if you irritated her too much. I like to think that we are above that, but we are not." Then he stroked my belly, and I felt the warm maleness resting against my flank stir again. "Are you sure we should be doing this?"

"Probably not," I answered, irritated at being compared to a whelping bitch. "After all, the dogs don't," and he withdrew, stung.

I hated it when I bumped things, or when I had to let out my already-voluminous dresses once again. At night my flanks and sides burned like fire, almost as if the child were splitting me in two, forcing me to open wider. "How much bigger is this infant going to get?" I complained to Dr. Thierman one day, when the fire in my sides kept me from sleeping night after night. "Might there be two?"

He felt all over my swollen belly, then lightly ran his fingers over the wrinkly stretched ridges where my skin had expanded more slowly than the fruit of my womb. "A good chance there's only one, Mme. de Chagny. Nor do I expect a terribly large offspring, although it feels like one, as you have a slighter frame."

"I'm sick of this," I said. "You say I have two to four weeks more. I'm not sure I can bear it any longer."

"You can, and you will," he said calmly. "My wife has had six children, and with each she swore she could not endure the last few weeks. These weeks will be over soon. Before you know it, you will hold your child in your arms, at your breast."

I looked hesitantly at him, and he said swiftly, "You're not thinking of wet-nursing, are you?"

"I don't know," I replied. "Why should there be a difficulty?"

Thierman had a way of changing the temperature around himself. Warm summer turned to winter by a rise of the shoulders, the raising of an eyebrow, the slow turning of his fat face with its gold-rimmed glasses. I hadn't seen him this cold since our first meeting, when I had inadvertently asked him for some medicine to 'cure' my supposed 'illness.' "Unless I am a sad judge of women's characters, Mme. de Chagny, you are a natural mother, one who will love her children and make every sacrifice for them. I know your husband bears a noble name, although you do not live as the nobility, which I hold to your credit. Nonetheless, the unfortunate tendency to avoid the further responsibilities of motherhood, beyond the bearing of the child, affect all classes who have the means to engage a wet-nurse."

"What's wrong with it?" I asked, chafing at his domineering and paternal tone. The few singers at the Opera Garnier who had had children found wet-nurses at once, and were back on the stage within the month, slim and energetic as ever.

"Have you ever seen a drunken baby, Mme. de Chagny?" he asked, challenging me.

I looked around the dark-panelled examining room with its cutaway drawings of the human frame, muscles, nerves, bones all laid bare. I look like that inside, I thought. So does Raoul. So did Erik. This conversation suddenly made me very tired, and my hips ached on the wooden chair. "Where would I have ever seen a drunken baby?"

"When the wet-nurse plies herself with gin or brandy, it goes straight to her milk, and then right down the throat of the little one in her charge."

"I certainly have no intention of hiring a drunken wet-nurse," I said indignantly.

"No one ever does," he answered back. "But consider this. You told me you lived with farm animals. How does the mare, or the mother goat, or the cow look when her baby nurses from her?"

"In bliss," I had to admit. "We used to let the calf have the first milk when he was very young. It was as if the whole barn filled with light."

"That's right. I'm not saying it's not work. You have to rest, and partake of a few foods you haven't had since childhood. The old wives say, 'A tooth for every baby,' but I'll have none of that in my practice. You'll eat custard, and eggs, and milk every day. You might not resume that girlish figure at once, and you may miss the upcoming 'season' this year."

"That doesn't matter to me," I interrupted. "Most evenings find us at home, studying Flemish."

He laughed until his round sides shook. "Nothing like the language of the Netherlands to put you to sleep. But seriously, Madame, I beg you to forsake the idea of a wet-nurse. With the proper food and rest, you and your baby will be far happier."

I endured, one day to the next. Then one morning as I walked in the November-grey garden, a weight like a sack of flour unceremoniously dropped down in the bowl of my hips. The child in my womb seemed to have fallen a few inches. Some of the upward pressure on my chest was gone, and I drank the cold air in greedily. But the encumbrance on my back and legs, intense before, was now almost overwhelming. I waddled back into the house, staggered up the stairs, and looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.

A band of pressure tightened around my girth, squeezing me in a great iron corset. Then it released. The maid came into the kitchen to investigate why I'd encroached on her domain. I stood at the sink and began to wipe the breakfast dishes. "Ma'am, I can do that," she started to say, but I waved her off. As I wiped, I leaned on the sink, lashed by unrelenting bands of pain. When all the dishes were cleaned, I washed the sink and counters. Each time I lifted the bucket, the fierce squeezing crushed me harder.

"Ma'am, please..." begged the maid.

"Get out," I growled, and she did. She must have run all the way down to the law library, to tell M. de Chagny that his wife had gone mad, for what lady of the house would be on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor? I gathered that was where she went, for an hour or so later Raoul came in, a puzzled expression on his face. I hung over the bucket on my hands and knees, feeling my insides twist.

"I'm sending for the doctor," he said abruptly.

"Nonsense," I replied. "They're just little cramps. He'll be in the office all day with sick people. No need to bother him with me," and then I could speak no longer, as a giant's hand squashed the breath out of me.

"Christine," he begged.

"Haven't you ever seen a woman have a baby before?" I snapped, and then he laughed with nervous overtones. Of course he hadn't. "Look to your shoes, anyway. This floor is clean," and so he stepped out of the kitchen, hanging in the doorway to watch me carefully.

"So when have you seen a woman have a baby?" he asked lightly, his face turning serious as I crouched under a wrenching wave that lasted even longer than the last one.

When it passed, I told him, "My mother, when she bore my sister. I was just a little girl of four. Our cottage had one room, and it was winter. There was nowhere to go, so I sat on my bed all night while she travailed. Then the midwife came, and ..." Another band of pain wrapped itself around me, and against my will I cried out.

"The midwife what?" Raoul said. "Oh, hang this, where is that maid? I'm sending her for the doctor. Can't you at least get up?"

"No! I don't need the doctor! The midwife? My mother was delivered, what else did you think happened? She sat up on the stool, and that was that. I watched everything, and so did my father. It took a long time, all night." There was blood, too, I thought. A lot of blood. Oh, God, what had I gotten myself into?

"I never knew you had a sister," he said, as another pain struck me.

"I don't, anymore," I said when I had recovered. "She died while still a baby, of some kind of fever," and I gripped the wood hard, so my nails dug into it a little. Then I leaned over and spewed the remains of my breakfast into the bucket. It sent Raoul into a frenzy. Energetically he called for the maid twice, three times, and when her feet came tapping down the stairs, he said with force, "Go for Dr. Thierman now. Look, I'll write down the address. Tell him Mme. de Chagny is having pains and has just lost the contents of her stomach. Don't delay, either." To me he turned. "Shouldn't you go to bed?"

He helped me to my feet, but I shook off his arm. "I can walk, and no, I'm not going to bed." Another pain hit, this time long and strong, and I began to get a little frightened. If this was the beginning, what would the end be like? When I stood, the savage pains relented a little. "Look," I said to Raoul, "I'm fine now, and am going to water the ferns." Dubiously he looked me over. When the doctor arrived a few hours later to the sight of me polishing brass candlesticks, his clownlike smile was directed more towards Raoul than myself.

"New fathers cause me more difficulty than new mothers," he joked. He placed his hand on my abdomen and pressed lightly. "Good, it's dropped well." Raoul hovered anxiously, like a prisoner awaiting a verdict. "M. de Chagny, I recommend you go to a restaurant, take a leisurely lunch laced with a couple of pints of good strong ale, and then consider how much paperwork you have to catch up on at your office. I will send for my nurse, who has caught almost as many babies as I have. There's no need for panic, as I'm sure Mme. de Chagny has already told you," and I glared at him and Raoul both, nodding fiercely.

When the iron-faced nurse arrived, she no longer appeared to me like a sphinx to be tolerated. Instead, I grasped her hand and wouldn't let go. She was like Juno herself, no longer cold and distant, but instead strong and reserved, a fountain of hidden knowledge whose depths we both were going to plumb throughout the afternoon and into the night. Or so her silent, stern face said. In the kitchen she boiled water in a little pan and made a light gruel laced with honey. I sucked it off the spoon as if I were a child myself, taking little bites in between pains.

When I began to pant in between the pains, the nurse smiled for the first time and announced, "It's time to go upstairs now, Madame." So with the maid on one side, the nurse on the other, I walked up the long stairwell to our room, stopping every few steps as another riveting pain clanged through me. Oh, blessed Virgin, I prayed, let me come down these steps again. Don't let me die. Water ran down my leg, and I cried out in fear.

The nurse wiped it with her hand and looked at the moisture, then sniffed it. "Good," she said mysteriously. "All clear." The strangeness of her comment was swept away by a black rush of pain different than the ones before, and I screamed out loud. "Go for the doctor," she directed the maid. "Tell him that I said it is time." After the maid was gone, she undressed me and said quietly, "Keep it inside." She brought her flat expressionless face towards me, and held my head in her hands, her cold grey eyes boring into mine. "Listen to me. Do not scream. It's not good for you or the baby. Look here, I've brought my stool. But if you scream, or thrash, or lose control, Dr. Theirman won't let me use it, and instead it will be chloroform and forceps for you."

I nodded mutely. The horrible reek of chloroform came back to me, as I remembered Erik clamping a rag soaked with the stuff over my face, and the terrible sickness that followed. I didn't know what forceps were, but they must have been dreadful, from the tone in the nurse's voice.

Under a terrible weight of pain I staggered. Instead of screaming, I clamped my jaws together and gripped the nurse's hand as tightly as I could. She reached up between my legs and felt around. Just as I was about to protest this indignity, she half-carried me over to the birthing chair, pulling my nightdress up above my hips as we went. Then, to my shame, a black shadow obscured the light from the hall, a large round-shouldered shape followed by a taller, leaner one. Dr. Thierman looked into the bedroom, then gripped Raoul by the arm, turning him back into the hallway. "It's downstairs for you, my man," he said with a laugh under his voice.

The sight of Raoul awakened me from my torpor of pain. I wanted him near me, wanted him to hold and comfort me, and I cried out piteously for him over and over. Death loomed over me, but rather than the soothing of his warm kind hands, the last of him I would have was his face vanishing through the door. The nurse gripped my hand and whispered harshly into my ear, "Stop that. Don't scream out, remember? Your husband will be with you shortly. Now it's up to us," and so I quieted down, really frightened now.

I sat in the hard birthing chair with Thierman's hands up under my nightshirt, fingers exploring my opening in a way that not even Raoul had dared. One pain crushed me after another, with barely room to breathe in between. The child within me twisted over, then back again. When I looked down at Thierman's large head between my legs, I cried out, "Oh, God, what's wrong?" for his hands and my thighs were smeared with blood.

He looked up quizzically. "Nothing at all, Madame. Surely you know a little blood comes with every lying-in." Then with each squeeze came a burning, as if that sack of flour I carried on my hips was trying to push itself out through a keyhole. By now I couldn't stop the waves, coming on now bitter and tearing. A shuddering low coloratura came out of me, never pausing for breath, as something hot and wet slid between my legs. Thierman shouted, "It's all in the ischial spines! I was right about the spines, again!" and the nurse said soothingly, "Indeed you were." I leaned back in the hard chair and panted, too frightened to look down.

Thierman and the nurse made murmuring, approving noises, and then a faint cat's mewling started, that turned to a long, drawn-out cry. Giddy with relief, I glanced down to see a blue snaking cord. Recoiling at the blood-soaked rags and bloody water in the pan, I followed the blue cord to the source of that pitched wailing. In Thierman's hands lay a baby, and from the unmistakable size and thrust of him, a boy. Then a sluice of thick hot matter shot out of me and plopped into the metal tray below, followed by one large surge of blood, then another. It's my death come for me this day, I thought. As I swooned, the last I heard before the blackness was Thierman's command, "Get her into bed and get those feet in the air!"

Someone was kneading my stomach like bread, and I grunted with the pain. "Where's my baby?" I cried, trying to sit up, but the nurse pushed me down. "He's fine, you'll hold him soon. But we must take care of you first," and she continued to squeeze down into the depths, molding me like clay under the artist's hand.

"Bring the child over," Thierman said, and the swaddled baby lay in my arms, moving his little head back and forth, making fish-like motions with his mouth, red little face screwed up and head all wrinkled, slightly bulging in the back.

"Is his head all right?" I asked anxiously.

Thierman laughed. "It's molding. He'll straighten out in a day or so. He's beautiful, Mme. de Chagny, and an easy birth it was, too. Now onto the breast with him."

An easy birth, I thought. So this was an easy one, and I prayed sincerely to never know one that was difficult.

The baby's mouth popped open and closed like one of the goldfish in the botanical garden pond. Around the pink tip of my breast he went, and into his mouth slid the whole colored part, down deep into his mouth. He pulled with a strength I wouldn't have thought possible. Tears came to my eyes, of pleasure, of pain at the fierce sucking, of relief. There before me stood Raoul, hands suddenly everywhere, on my hair, my face, hovering above my exposed breast, drifting over my flattened belly, drifting without touching, taking it all in with eyes and hands.

When the nipple slipped out of the baby's mouth, the nurse picked him up and handed him to to Raoul, who stared at the thick shock of black hair crowning the delicate baby head. Raoul examined the infant's face before anything else, then unswaddled him so to inspect every fold, every crevice, every digit.

"Wrap that baby up," Dr. Thieman fumed. Normally kind and jocular, he spoke sharply to Raoul, whose behavior baffled him. "Do you want him to catch pneumonia, and him not a few hours old?"

I turned my face away. I knew what Raoul was looking for. But there was nothing unusual, just a long, muscular, red-faced baby who squalled and wet and squirmed like any other.

Thierman sat by my bedside filling out certificates. When he entered the date of our marriage alongside that of our son's birth, Raoul defied him with stares to reproach us, but the doctor showed himself just as impervious to simple arithmetic that nine minus six equals three as was Raoul himself. "A fine birth," he kept saying, signing the article of birth with a flourish, handing it to the nurse to sign as a witness. Then Raoul signed while little Philippe sucked again.

"Will it hurt like this always?" I asked, for the thin pains brought tears to my eyes. The nurse shook her head, no, it seemed I would toughen up, and it was true, as the pains were soon supplanted by deep shocks of pleasure that pulled through me like cords. Every few hours he yanked and tugged me dry, then rolled his eyes back in drugged infant sleep. Overlaid on that sweet face I saw another image, another's eyes rolled back in bliss, another's face caressed from torment into the womb of unconsciousness.

I held close the little sleeping fragment of my dark past, and thanked God that I would walk down those stairs again after all.

(_continued_...)


	6. The New Science

**The New Science**

The maid leaves me alone now in the mornings. She knows that it's my scribbling time. Tolerantly she smiles, for the world is awash today in women who write, and she reads their stories every week in the magazines. I have no such ambitions; I seek only to lay down a burden that I have carried for over thirty years. In the vast empty space left by death this burden pokes out its head, tentatively looks around, and says, are you ready for me now? Can you look at me? Can your children bear me?

Raoul said nothing of the awkward arithmetic which placed only six months between our marriage and Philippe's birth. He said nothing even after his brother's namesake grew up tall and thin and dark, as he stretched out into leanness instead of thickset blondness. Raoul never commented how Philippe's darkness set him so apart from those gold and blue Dresden figurines, his parents. Raoul said nothing for thirty-two years, not even on his deathbed where Philippe, father of four children himself, gripped his hand and wept like a child.

After the de Chagny family held the final council, after all the tears, the conferrals with lawyers, the dismissal of the lawsuit, the meetings in which I was never included, Raoul was welcomed back into their bosom. That we named our first child after his unfortunate brother did the most to touch their frosty and ravaged hearts.

The maid piles the calling cards up in a plate but I don't answer them. Instead, I think of Isabeau, our little white dove. She came third, sister to Philippe and Martine. With hair so blonde it looked like ice, with a bluish tinge heightened by the color of her eyes, she danced like a fairy on the greenway of our lives. Martine at age two burned with jealousy when Isabeau was born. Philippe doted on her, however. When Isabeau grew big enough to dart about, nose in everything, he took her on as his little charge and the two became inseparable.

Philippe loved Isabeau, but being with her emphasized his difference. Once I gave Philippe a coin to buy two sugar buns, one for him and one for Isabeau. He came home red-faced and furious. "She teased me, Mother," he said angrily. Isabeau started to whimper, and I asked incredulously, "Your sister?" Isabeau teased no one.

"No," he fiercely replied, "that fat stupid baker woman." Isabeau glanced at me to see what I would do when her brother referred to an adult that way.

"You shall not speak that way, Philippe," I said, stern. "Tell me what the woman at the bakery said."

"She asked if Isabeau was my sister, and I said yes. Then she kept making remarks that one of us must have been a changeling, because she was like a swan and I was like a crow." Isabeau began to cry. I held my arms out to her, but she ran over to Philippe instead, and he wrapped his arms around her.

"The crow is one of the most intelligent birds there is, other than the parrot," I said, and that mollified him a little.

"What about the swan, Mama?" Isabeau clamored. "Tell me something about the swan."

"The swan is loyal and true. He mates for life."

"Like you and Papa," she chirped.

I took both children in my arms, raven and swan alike. "Yes, darlings. Like Mama and Papa."

Then one dreadful morning in her sixth year she grew sick, begging for water, begging for anything cold. First her face caught fire, followed in a few hours by a vermilion stain that covered her back, her chest, her tender little limbs. By evening she couldn't speak for the pain. By midnight she could no longer hear us call her name. She neither blinked nor responded even when we thrust a candle right before her eyes.

Everyone said it was a mercy when she died the next day. The scarlet fever would have left her blind and deaf, and perhaps feeble-minded as well. No child could escape such a fire within and remain unscathed. After her funeral, I lay on the sofa, not moving or speaking, staining the damask with tears. Raoul asked me, "Do you want to move to the country? We can build a chateau, we have enough money to build five if we wish. Or would you rather return to Paris?" I looked carefully at his face, but it was an open and honest question. He would have returned even to that tomb, had he thought it would help. "No," I said. "This is our home now," and he sighed with relief.

Philippe was my comfort then. He pushed the thick dark hair back out of his eyes and pulled himself up to his full height, which was considerable even before he'd begun to grow in earnest. "Mother," he said, "you must get up. I insist, Mother. If Father won't make you, I will," and it seemed so curious from a boy of ten, that powerful mastery, that self-confidence. He had a beautiful clear soprano that had not yet deepened into the rich bronze baritone of manhood. I got up, because underneath his tones I heard the command that pulled at me so long ago, that awoke a sleeping heart even while freezing it with terror. He led me over to the piano. "I'll play for you, Mother," he said, "and you'll sing." He was a better cellist than pianist, but he competently worked through a few little _volkslieder_, and for the first time since Isabeau's illness and death I smiled and sang along.

She's with both my husbands now, forever six, forever beautiful with gossamer hair. In the eye of my heart she tenderly takes first a hand long and white and slender, calloused from fretting the violin. Then she takes the another, thick-fingered and blond-furred. Under the shade of cedars, sustained by the fragrance of apples, across the wide grassy plain they walk, each with a hand in a little girl's, with a little girl in between them.

Isabeau. I don't move to wipe the wet spots from this paper. Let them stay, jewels in the crowns of the happy dead.

Each morning I wrestle with pen and paper as Jacob struggled with the angel, and like Jacob I do not expect to escape a wounding. As I climb the ladder, beneath me yawns an abyss. Each rung is like a mountain, or the steps to the rooftop of the Opera. Each passage up another rung leaves me braver now to look into the darkness below. Each day finds me less afraid of the golden eyes that draw me onward, glowing in the depths.

His eyes weren't gold, not really. They were so brown as to be almost black. Nor did they actually glow in the dark. Through some strange quirk of birth (something _genetic_, as Philippe would say,) when in almost total darkness a little light did shine on them, they reflected that light with the colors of the back of the eye itself, like a cat's. But while the cat's eye shone red, his shone like gold coins, like the coins in the eyes of the dead.

Those dark-gold eyes that so easily filled with tears, that so easily followed me, they will never let me rest.

At twenty-four, Philippe was one of the youngest of the new doctors who had just finished medical training at the University of Louvain. Soon he would assume a position at the _Cliniques St. Luc, _but for a short while he relaxed at home for the first time in several long years. Raoul, Philippe, and I sat languidly in the dining room. The roast had been perfect, Philippe had returned, and a soft ease rested over us like a blanket. The maid had just cleared dessert while we lingered over cognac. Martine presided over her own table, having just married Jannecke a few months before. Our youngest, Louvel, had been excused to run off a bit more of his adolescent energy before bedtime.

Philippe and Raoul amused themselves by catching the lamplight's reflection off the polished silver of the butter knives. They made little darting "angels" of light dance across the room whenever the maid walked out. "Louvel should have stayed," I remarked. "Then you three boys could have played together."

Philippe put his knife down. "Oh, please don't stop on my account," I said, slightly embarrassed that I'd killed the game. Then the play of reflections brought something to my mind. "This light and how it moves around reminds me of something, Philippe. You should know this. How do cats' eyes shine in the dark they way they do?"

Philippe proceeded to enthusiastically explain in his thorough, detailed fashion the structures of the eye, how light entered through the lens to be collected on the retina, and how the _tapetum lucidum_ in the back of the cat's eye reflected light like a colored mirror. Then I said, "Can it ever happen with people?" thinking I was being subtle, but when I saw the look on his face, I knew that I'd let out too much.

"Why would you ask, Mother?" he said quietly.

"Have you heard of it?" I persisted.

"I have," he said with a sharp edge, "but it is rare. Very rare. In fact, it's one of the examples given to support the notion of inherited characteristics, which if you can believe are still in dispute, in some circles."

Raoul looked up, puzzled, because the air between Philippe and I suddenly filled with ice. "What's this about, you two?" he quipped. "Did I miss something?"

"You missed nothing, Father, or perhaps everything," Philippe said, rising to his full height. He slammed the door only a little as he went out. Raoul looked at me with a baffled expression and just shook his head. A flare of anger went through me, however. Raoul might take this mildly, but I could not. I followed Philippe into the parlor and stood staring up at him as he opened his cello case. He loomed over me, face red with suppressed anger.

"You don't speak to your father like that, even as a man," I snapped. "Especially as a man. To him you accord respect."

"What respect is shown towards me, Mother?" he asked caustically.

"You receive every consideration. Whatever your quarrel, it is with me, not him."

Abashed, he turned away, shoulders hunched as if to make himself smaller, less angry, less threatening. His fingers trembled out of control on the clips of the cello case, and he stopped trying to undo them. We sat in the parlor for awhile as purple-slanted twilight darkened the room. The maid stood in the parlor door, wanting to come in and light the lamps, but the cold fog of our mood kept her out. Philippe sat waiting until dusk turned to dark, just looking at me. The moon sent a sliver of light through a long window. When it fell across Philippe's face, one of his brown eyes glittered like a gold coin.

I sprang to my feet, almost crying, and stumbled out of the room. The maid slipped in after me, and behind me the soft pale glow of light chased away some of the anxious fog. Then I heard a long, deep note like a knife drawn across the throat of some dying animal, followed by cascading staccatos. Without looking back, I climbed the stairs and went to bed. Beneath me I could hear Philippe playing his cello wildly, fiercely, into the deep of the night. He must have stayed in the parlor all that long night, for his bed was undisturbed.  
The next morning I walked past and saw him replacing two strings. He glared at me and refused to speak.

When Philippe was little, he liked to hold a candle up to his eyes in a darkened room, in front of the mirror. It had never occurred to me back then to ask why.

It was in the next week after our quarrel that Philippe set up his new laboratory at the _Cliniques St. Luc_. A laboratory required glassware in assorted odd shapes and sizes, so to obtain his flasks and beakers and tubes, he spent afternoons at the glassmaker's. After a few weeks, Raoul jokingly asked him if it was the glassware he was interested in, or the glassmaker's daughter. Anki Gyselink kept her father's accounts, greeted customers, tidied the studio, and brought beer and sandwiches to the apprentices at midday. A fluffy Flemish partridge of a girl with glossy black hair and twinkling hazel eyes, she came up to the middle of Philippe's chest. It was easy to imagine her head resting there.

"He could have sent an assistant," I commented dryly to Raoul one day.

"That would defeat the purpose," Raoul chuckled.

That spring Philippe was gone for long hours at the hospital, or somewhere else. One evening he came in very late, smelling of blossoms, face flushed and eyes bright. With him was Anki, her soft round face warm as flame, her lips full and red, as if swollen from repeated kisses.

"Won't her father want her home?" Raoul asked.

"Eventually," Philippe replied, "but we thought we should tell you now. We want to announce the banns. It is our express wish to be married as soon as possible."

Raoul and I looked at each other piercingly. "You don't want to wait for a wedding?" My tongue dragged behind my thoughts for several seconds.

"You and Father didn't exactly have a society wedding, did you?" he retorted. Anki looked back and forth at the both of us intently, absorbing every word.

"Son," Raoul said in a kind, heavy voice, "You're not yet twenty-five. You can't post banns on your own."

"I know, Father," Philippe answered. "I'm of age to marry in six months. Anki is twenty, but her father will give permission. We're sure of that."

"You've asked him?" I said, angry that Philippe would have gone to Anki's father before us.

Anki spoke up in her strongly Dutch-accented French. "Just this evening, Mme. de Chagny. We meant no disrespect."

Philippe directed an expression at Raoul that said, Mothers, what do you expect? "I think it makes more sense to ask the father for the daughter's hand before making an announcement, wouldn't you say, Mother? After all, he could have refused me."

Defeated, dejected, I nodded. A sadness washed over me I couldn't explain. I looked at Raoul, what would he do? He had the power to restrain Philippe from marrying, for half a year if nothing else. Raoul rested his hands on his large thighs, and said nothing for a long moment. Finally he spoke, "I take it there's a substantial reason not to wait six months."

Philippe put his long slender arm protectively around Anki's yielding shoulders. She looked so like a little partridge, her black hair fluffy under the simple wool hat, her bosom swelling large in her tight cream-colored flannel dress. As she leaned her body submissively into his, I knew at once that they had been lovers, and that he didn't want her shamed. Brussels was no two-cow town, but it wasn't Paris either. Even in Paris an artisan's family like Anki's would have no tolerance for laxity.

Raoul waited patiently, and finally Philippe answered, "There is," saying no more.

"Do you love her?" I blurted out. "You must love her."

Anki's eyes went wide. "Of course I do," Philippe said. As he turned his head to plant on her face a brief kiss where cheek meets ear, I remembered an afternoon long ago in that registry office, and a promise I made to Philippe before his birth.

Then all eyes fell on Raoul. "You will have my permission," he said gravely. Then he rose, turned to Anki, all strong responsibility. Taking her hand, in Flemish he said, "Welcome, daughter."

Now Philippe, Anki, and all their children are my dark irises among a field of daffodils. A few months ago Anki and I bathed their daughters' slippery little olive bodies and tucked their dusky little heads into bed. The four- and six-year old girls squealed and squirmed about like seals. We corralled two wiggling children with towels and nightdresses. Poor Erik, I thought, he wouldn't have believed this. He wouldn't have thought it ever possible, that so much life could have come out of his sadness. You could have filled another lake under the Garnier Opera, you could have filled the Seine itself with his tears.

As a physician, Philippe must know. He too can count, and he not only has learned the recently discovered laws of heredity, he has made their disorders his principal field of research. Never has he become angry with me since that night he broke his cello strings, but his eyes follow me, and his questions wait hungrily for any scrap to drop from our conversations.

Before I returned to this palace of echoes, I sat at Philippe and Anki's kitchen table drinking some warm milk at bedtime. Philippe came in with a stack of scientific papers in his hand and casually began to read them at the table, stopping only to make a mark or two in the margins.

"Genetics, that's the new science, Mother," he said presently. "I've written Dr. Bateson in London, seeking a fellowship. Anki is hoping you'll stay here with her. It will be for half a year, but I'll be back every month or two to visit. After all, it's only London, and not so far away." When I didn't say anything, he added, "She would love you to stay with the children. We can engage nurses and nannies, but nothing can replace a grandmother."

He showed me a chart, all lines and squiggles, squares and circles. "What is this?" I asked, confused.

"It's no more complicated than musical notation," he said. "Here's the father, and this one's the mother. This capital letter here represents a dominant gene, in this case brown eyes. The small letter represents the recessive, in this case the blue."

He went on to explain how generally difficult it was for two blue-eyed parents to have brown-eyed children, and then his dark eyes rested calmly and expectantly on me, as if to say, Will you tell me a story? He used to look like that when very small, when every night he waited patiently to hear of the little boy who went exploring in the Hall of the Mountain King.

I got up abruptly, claiming fatigue. He sighed and put his papers aside, brushing back the unruly black locks that he refused to cut short. "Very well, Mother," he said coolly. "Would you think about my request, so I can tell Anki something?"

"I will, but there are some things at home I have to do first," and with that I fled to my room, tears stinging my eyes.

The tender blue night wafted in through my bedroom window. Below me I could hear him playing the cello, softly, sadly.

Philippe, if you find this, I'll be long since dust. Forgive me. Ask your brother and sister to forgive me as well, because I committed the cardinal sin of parenting, even worse than bringing strange fruit into the basket.

While the sin that engendered you was long since confessed and not even deemed worthy of forgiveness, here is the one unconfessed and unforgiven: I loved you more than the others. You were the child of my heart, because despite the horrors of that underground wedding, as dreadful as were the stripes and burdens laid upon Raoul and I as a consequence, as terrible as your father's death was, there is so much of your father, so much of the good of your father in you.

Still you, always you, and I always expected God to take you from me, to strike you down like Absalom. I would have even named you Absalom, daring God to take you, but Raoul wanted to name you Philippe. I agreed, and trembled at my boldness to shake my fist in the face of God. Oh, God got his own back, when He took your sweet sister instead. You never knew why, child of my first heart, child of my first marriage, you never knew why I cried on the sofa that week. I cried out of guilt, because I was so happy that He had spared you, so tormented that I could even think it.

Anki, now Anki, in her calm sensible way, she would say that there's nothing to forgive. It wouldn't be the first time it happened in the world, now, would it? A lonely older man, a young and naive woman, a seduction, and look what's come of it. Then she would sweep her pillowy arm around those four dark olive plants arranged around Philippe's table, all a little over a year apart, basking in their father's smiles, their mother's soft round features. Anki would thank me. That helps, a little.

Philippe needs to know, not all of it, perhaps. Some things are too terrible to know, even for those compelled to bear them. I held my tongue for Raoul's sake for so many years. But now Raoul is dead. Before Philippe can meet his sire across the abyss of death, I must re-establish my own aquaintance with him. Once more I descend into that black chasm of the past, where the monster in my own breast hides with Erik, with all the other lost and ragged souls that crept in the darkness, preferring it to light.

Long ago I begged the "angel" to form himself into something my human senses could apprehend. A girl raised on stories of tall ships whose long-haired men pillaged the coasts, of naked fairy fiddlers, of enchanted horses in mysterious pools, of gods so human they died, should have known the most basic rule of fairyland. When the mortal attempts to command the spirit, she should not be surprised when the spirit obeys. The spirit comes when he wills, and upon she who calls are bestowed both horrors and delights.

It's time to go back, to once again call not an angel, not a spirit, not a demon, but a man. Erik, come forth.

( _con't…_)


	7. Looking Glass

**Looking Glass**

I never reproached myself for stupidity, never blamed myself for the naïve belief that a man of flesh and blood, as twisted and distorted as that flesh was, could be an "angel." I never blamed myself for believing that when a man offered something, that it was really his to give. For I believed in everything then.

There's no shame in belief. When I tell the grandchildren a story now of tomten or trolls, and see the same wonder and delight in their eyes that shone in mine as a child, I feel no remorse for telling them something that isn't true. Children believe; it's their nature. I believed, long past the point of childhood.

There's no reproach for me now in not believing. I have no interest in arguing the truth or falsehood of the conventional pieties. Blind belief is harder for me now, and heaven incomprehensible. All the same, I know Raoul is there, preparing a place for me. He waits, outside this tall-windowed room with the elm-filtered light that bathes me in soft light green as a gown while I write.

I know that life moves through all the forms of nature, like a new child stirring within the womb. Death moves through the earth as lava spews from the volcano, or as slowly as the turn of the worm. The earth moves under my pen, and the pen moves with it. Events get set in motion; they go on their course; the seed gets planted and comes to fruition, the leaf falls and turns to mulch under the winter snows, and in the thick muck of spring the new seed sprouts.

Belief or non-belief; angel or devil; man or monster - Erik, over thirty years dead, isn't for me to judge. Erik waits too, and he's free to emerge if he wishes, free to emerge after being buried inside me for so long, buried inside my heart as he once buried himself inside my body. He's free to come out, or not. If he does, I will greet him, without fear, without sentimentality, without remorse.

In fact, if he emerges, I welcome him. I spent so many decades pushing down every memory of him, only to have those recollections ripped from their grave every time Philippe played melancholy Borodin on the cello, or stood with hand on hip and head wagged to the side, his father's characteristic pose. Now the time has come to call him by his name and loosen the grip he has had on my life, on all our lives. I never knew his real one, true, but recounting his lacerating loves, his tender hatreds, his icy passions and flaming thoughts perhaps may serve as well as a name.

I put one foot over the edge, debating. Cold air rushes up at me from beneath, rich with the aroma of the grave. Why not fall? There's no one to catch me anyway. So down I fall, into the past. Down I fall, through the glass.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Don't fool yourself, I repeated silently as I looked around the silent and empty dressing room. You know this is no spirit whom you hear every morning except Sundays. No spirit would ask you so many questions about yourself, about Papa, about Raoul. No angel would sound so possessive, so jealous, so sad. An angel wouldn't need to ask these things. An angel would simply know. An angel would not be crushed by a falling chandelier.

Yet it was the voice of an angel that crept up stealthily around me, first from far away, then tenderly and intimately close, nearer than my ear, almost under my skin. That soft seductive voice spun my father's melody, with the sacred words, and as it approached it gathered strength and authority, singing,

_I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live._

Did I believe in him who called me thus? I never feared madness. That a spirit should come to me was only to be expected; I would have been disappointed had it not. That this spirit of silver melody could be a man, of flesh and bone and blood, of passions and rages and calm melancholy contemplation, passed my mind more than once before the great chandelier came crashing to the orchestra pit this very night.

_And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? _

The sliding, scraping noise, like stone moving over stone, came from the direction of my mirror. As I walked toward it, I saw the surface of the mirror growing misty, with a pale light not on it, exactly, but more behind it. The mirror itself seemed to soften, and I reached out to touch it, but felt only its cold hard surface. Behind the swirls of bluish mist I spied a vague dark shape, a man's shape, moving slowly toward the mirror so that it seemed to come directly at me, almost moving through the mirror itself.

_The Master is come, and calleth for thee._

I put my hand out again, and this time instead of its cold silvered surface I felt first warm air, and then a wave of colder, damp air. I walked on, no longer fearing any bump into the glass. All through my stomach beat an incredible lightness, almost like dancing. The scraping noise behind me startled me back to my senses, and I found myself in a stone corridor, alone with a man all in black.

He stood before me tall and of a spectral slenderness. A black fabric mask embroidered with silver threads covered his entire face, and within the eyeholes of the mask, his ebony eyes faintly glowed in the center, as if two tiny golden candle flames shone from the back of his head. As he breathed, a little flutter of mesh at the mouth moved back and forth in time with his exhalations.

Then he took my wrist and I jerked back with a loud cry. The hand which touched me reminded me of a dead man's. I gripped him back, trying to force his clutch from my arm. Horribly, when my fingers closed around it the icy skin yielded in that soft, sodden way of a corpse. I remembered that when my father died, Mama Valerius insisted I kiss him before the joiners came to lay him out in the coffin. I didn't want to, and I argued and cried, but she insisted that his soul would not rest without some gesture of affection from me. Sulking and terrified, I approached his body and brought my lips up to his sunken chin already bluish with the shadow of the hair that grows after death. It didn't feel like skin under my lips, but rather wax, congealed wax that smelled sickly-sweet with the corruption below.

The strange man's hand felt like that. But it was obvious that this was no spirit. This was a man whose icy grip pulled me firmly along the passage. The skin was rotten-soft, almost slippery, but the sinews and bone underneath were hard stems of steel.

"Who are you? Where is my teacher?" I demanded. He said nothing. So this was my so-called "angel of music." An angel of ice, I thought, with a hand that reaches up for me out of the grave. "Where are we going?" Only silence. I looked back towards the back of the mirror that hung silvered at the end of the corridor. I thought, if it opened so easily from out here, perhaps I can get back in, and call for help. Lunging toward the mirror, I felt his arms grip me so tightly I wailed in pain. He roughly hoisted me onto his shoulder, almost knocking off the loose wide hat pulled down low over his head, and terror overwhelmed me. Whoever this man was, he intended to carry me off. Screaming, I struggled and kicked as he pulled me around to the front of his body.

My knees gave way as he dragged me around towards him and pressed me up against his chest. Until now, the word "ravished" had been only a vague abstraction from an adventure story. He gripped me by the hair and forced my face into his front, near the pocket of his vest. He must have had some kind of kerchief there, because my face squashed up against soft fabric, and at once the most delightful smell floated up through my compressed nose.

It was a perfume, but had nothing of flowers in it. Now I would describe it as a chemical smell, entirely artificial. It reminded me of nothing in nature, neither musk, nor blossom, nor sweet oil. Immediately a langour suffused me, and if his hand had not wrapped itself around my back I would have fallen. All my limbs went soft, and while my mind stayed clear, it was as if all will left me, and all fear. He pulled my face away from his breast pocket and I stared calmly up at that silk-embroidered mask.

Drugged, trusting, I lifted my arms up to him, and he picked me up awkwardly in his own. Even in my languid state I shrank from the touch of his bare skin, so like my dead Papa's. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against that spare, hard chest, drifting like a caterpillar in its chrysalis, without time.

When I saw light again, we sat beside a little fountain carved out of the stone wall. A lascivious Pan face with two twisted horns and long curly locks grinned wickedly at me as water spurted from its mouth. On the shadowy man's hard knee I rested as he sponged my head with cold water from the fountain. He wiped my face with his kerchief, but the strange piercing smell was gone, replaced by another, softer one. It made me feel light and fluttery inside, almost giddy. I stood and did not fall, but my feet felt very far away. Laughter came from somewhere close by. It was mine, so I laughed some more until distracted by a nearby clopping noise.

Before my blurred eyes stood my best of horse friends, Cesar, the staunchest and most gentle of the Andalusians of the Opera stable. He was the horse upon which one could always rely never to step on someone's foot, never to start or shy, and the stablehands liked to brag that he was so refined he would never think of soiling the stage. When I had first begun to sing at the Opera; when no one would talk to me and the loneliness almost overcame me, I would go into the stables and put my face up against Cesar's warm flank, and feed him scraps of carrots from the market.

The man all in black stroked Cesar's shoulder gently. The horse nickered and nuzzled at him, and I began to trust the man a little. He has been kind to Cesar, I thought as my head swam. I reached out to pat the wet horse nose and he nuzzled my hand, investigating.

"No carrot for you, my friend. So sorry." I said.

Then to my astonishment, the man in black pulled a stump of carrot out of his pocket and silently handed it to me. I took the carrot wonderingly and broke it in half, giving him the other piece back. We fed Cesar half of the carrot each, and I continued to stroke his strong neck. Then I noticed the saddle. "It's beautiful," I said dreamily. "I've never seen anything like it. What is it?" Made of cloth instead of leather, it was beautifully embroidered in looping arabesque designs almost too faint to see in the dim light of the corridor. I reached out to touch it, and it felt like the softest wool.

He lifted me almost effortlessly and since I wore Siebel's tights and doublet, I straddled Cesar like a man. My abductor mounted behind me. How amusing, I thought, this saddle was meant for one, but now there are two. His body went up right against my back, and while his hands might have been cold, the rest of his body was warm like any other. He reached around me to use the reins, pulling me towards him. As Cesar started to walk, I began to struggle feebly, vaguely remembering that something should be wrong with a man's body moulded so closely to mine. Leaning back, I forgot why I struggled.

Against him I dreamily relaxed as we went down innumerable stairs at a slow walk. The big body of the horse moved between my legs, and the man's body behind me moved in rhythm with it, keeping me sandwiched in warmth. He let the reins go loose, and put one hand around my waist to keep me from slipping off. I could feel his breath on my hair and it was a struggle to keep from going to sleep. I giggled a little at the clatter of Cesar's hooves on the stone.

"So much noise … we'll wake everyone up, and then won't they be cross?"

I could not say how long we rode that way. At one point I found myself caressing the fine wool of the saddle, then reached up to stroke Cesar's long mane. The horse stopped, bringing us to the shore of a vast lake. A small rowboat lay on the shore, two oars sticking upward. I looked around at the cavernous room, and the bluish-silver water, and wondered how we had gotten there at first. Time seemed to move very slowly, or not at all.

Dizzy, I gripped Cesar's mane and would have fallen off had the man not already dismounted and hoisted me down. I yielded, almost falling into his arms, as my own limbs had not fully recovered their movement. He unsaddled Cesar and placed the saddle in the boat. I clung to the horse's neck, still disoriented, and the man waited patiently for me to hug the Andalusian.

I looked up like a child into his face, that through his tallness and my dazed state seemed impossibly high above me, almost out of reach. The man in black patted Cesar sharply on the rump and he ran off, hoofs clattering as he climbed the stairs the way we had come.

Then he lifted me again, closer to his chest and face this time, so that his breath, laced with a little stale wine, drifted over me from under his silvery-black mask. He set me in the boat as gently as if I were a china doll. Silently across the lake he rowed with movements regular and sure, and still he said nothing. With the water and the coolness came a revival of my consciousness, and the return of fear. I knew then that he had drugged me to secure my compliance and confuse my senses, so that even if I had escaped, I would not know the way back. I thought of jumping into the lake, but had no idea of its depth or what horrid creatures slithered beneath its murky surface. So I stayed where I was, still lethargic and drugged, and he rowed on without flagging.

Upon the far shore there was some sort of dock. When we moored, he reached for me but I shrank struggling away from him. Paying me no heed, he lifted me as effortlessly as he had raised me up on Cesar's back, swinging me from the boat to the shore. Then terror struck harder than before, for before he slung me over his shoulder, I saw our destination – a door built directly into the stone wall itself. He was carrying me into some kind of den, I knew not what, and once I went in, would I ever come out? One arm gripped my kicking legs mercilessly, holding them entirely immobile. The other pinioned my back. My beating fists against his body he ignored entirely. Screams echoed through the cavern, but there was no one to hear.

Firmly shutting my eyes against the horror, I imagined some filthy, rat-infested dungeon of vice with overturned bottles of spirits on the floor, filth spattered on the wall, a long table stained with blood on which rested silver knives. I opened them to no such thing. The small room in which I found myself deposited combined a dining room and parlor. A cheerful fire blazed under the Louis-Philippe styled mantelpiece, on which ticked an ornate Ormelu clock. Then a scraping came behind me, followed by a click. We were locked in, and the thick door had no handle, no keyhole, no locking mechanism.

I was a prisoner five cellars down from the street. No one knew where I was. And there was no ready means of escape.

I turned to the man in black, who fidgeted nervously with his sleeves, alternately picking them and rubbing his hands across them. He hung his cloak on a peg near the door. Careful removal of his hat disclosed full black hair, but its unmoving and artificial texture suggested a wig. Those nervous hands flapped back and forth. It was clear that while he had me here, he didn't know quite what to do with me. Seeing his discomforture, I snapped out, "Are you mad? What game do you play here?"

Quietly he said, "Don't fear, Christine. I won't hurt you."

That was the first lie he told directly to my face, even if I didn't know it at the time. Never mind the previous lie, that he was a spirit sent by my father to develop my voice, to measure my dedication to my father by how diligently I did the angel's bidding. As I said, I believed in everything then.

It was also the first time I could link a voice with a body. "It can't be," I said with a throat raw from screaming. "My Voice was an angel. You are a kidnapper, and probably a rapist too."

He drew himself up to his full height, almost two heads above me. In black evening dress he filled the room, making me shrink back. Then with the supplicant aspect of a lover, he reached for me with outstretched hands. Filled with rage, I said, "Who are you, you coward? Let me see the face of my jailer before you ravish and kill me," and I rushed towards him, intent on ripping that samite veil right off of him. By the fineness of his bearing, I thought he was perhaps some debauched nobleman who kept an apartment under the Opera, the better to prey on girls, and who for the sake of society's good regard kept his face concealed.

I was so young then. It never occurred to me that any man who used a secret doorway into a girl's dressing room, lured her out with hypnotic music, then drugged her and carried her into his rooms for who knows what evil purpose, might not want his face revealed. The fierce impetuosity of youth disallowed the possibility that my kidnapper might kill me if I saw his face and could identify him.

Spinning me around like a top, he pulled me against his body and restrained my arms. Before I could kick his shins, he had slammed me down onto a chair and spun himself around from behind, pulling my arms up behind me so that I couldn't struggle. Up against my ear he whispered in the softest, sweetest voice imaginable words that soothed as well as threatened, "Never touch the mask, do you understand? I won't be responsible for what happens if you do. But never, do you understand, never touch the mask."

To show my understanding, I nodded and smiled as my first flush of anger gave way to calmer reason. His height, his speed, and the terrible length and power of his arms made me no match for him whatever. He could overpower me physically and do whatever he wanted. To survive, I would have to find out what he wanted, listen to him, humor him, and be ready to bolt for escape at first opportunity.

His exertions had warmed his hands, and they no longer felt clammy like a corpse's. "Please unhand me, Monsieur," I said quietly. "I won't fly at you again."

Gently his arms drifted off me, lingering just a little too long on my shoulders. Then what I suspected I came to know, for he came around and sat before me on the _pouffe_, his begging hands laid out before me but not touching. "I knew you weren't an angel even before I saw you," I said, trying not to cast my eyes too visibly around the apartment as I looked for other doors, any way out at all. "No angel asks whether or not I might have entertained men in my dressing room. Your too-personal questions and concerns gave it away."

He hung his head a little. "I'm surprised you believed it as long as you did. I'm only a man, a man who loves you. I am Erik."

"Well, Monsieur Erik, you already seem to know me, so I don't have to introduce myself. But I am terribly thirsty, which as a music teacher you should know ruins the voice." He looked hard at me through the eyeholes of his mask. "Where could I go?" I said, and so up he rose up with jerky spastic energy.

After he disappeared behind a brown velvet curtain, I swiftly surveyed the room. There were no fireplace tools, no poker I could grab with which to defend myself, and no apparent exits. There was the thick stone door through which we had come, two conventional doors to the right and left, and straight ahead the brown curtain through which he had gone.

The room was conventionally furnished, and save for the absence of windows, could have been found in any one of the flats in a respectable middle-class section of Paris. What set it apart were the rows of bookshelves that lined almost every available wall. On a stand in the corner sat a violin case. Then there were nooks, shelves, and more books. I quickly glanced over the titles but most were unfamiliar to me, with names like Nietzche, Marlowe, and Bruno. If I wanted to throw books at him one after the another, there would have been more than enough ammunition.

He returned with a blue stone bottle of ginger beer, uncorked. "I recognize some of your books," I said. "Didn't Goethe write _Faust_?"

"Yes, and with a happier ending than we see on our stage. You might say he wrote _Faust Triumphant_," and he gave a little chuckle.

"_Faust Triumphant_? How?" At the time I had no idea what he meant.

"Monsieur Gounod uses only the first half of the story, which ends when his Gretchen - our Marguerite - rises up to Heaven. In Goethe, Faust goes on to woo Helen of Troy and eventually finds salvation."

I frowned. "I can't imagine the opera twice as long as it is now."

He gave a short bark of laughter. "Come and sit," he said, but I continued to linger by the book-covered wall.

He came up to me far closer than a man in a drawing-room should, and gestured forcefully that I should sit down in a soft chair upholstered in some arabesque pattern. It occurred to me that the ginger drink might have been drugged, but if he wished to intoxicate me again, all he had to do was cover my face with his handkerchiefs. A few more breathfuls, and those powerful compounds would reduce me either to unconsciousness, or hysterical and helpless laughter. So I sat and drank the sharp fizzy concoction.

When I complimented him on it for not being too sweet, the praise pleased him more than it should have. From it he took encouragement. Sitting at my feet, pulling his long legs up to his chest like a praying mantis's, he watched me with an almost hungry expression. Then, clearing his throat nervously, he began to speak. As long as I live, that speech will remain with me.

"Christine," he began, in a voice wavering with emotion, "Erik has lied to you from the very beginning. There was no 'angel of music,' only Erik. Only Erik who saw you trembling and hesitant, so afraid at your first rehearsal with the National Opera. Only Erik watched you pass through the grand foyer to stare at the murals on the ceilings above. Only Erik saw you so proud of your new fur, who would have bought you one far better, far softer, for only the privilege of once in a while running his hands through the sleekness of your muff, or feeling your arm through his, to caress your sleeve."

He rose and paced in front of me, ignoring my shock. "How could I ever approach you? You would have run away in fear, left for another position, perhaps even departed for another city."

"You presume too much, Monsieur," I said with even voice.

"I presume nothing," he said with greater agitation, "I know women better than you, even. Do not protest that since you are one, you thus know women more thoroughly than I. That would be like the landscape pretending to describe its own geography. The cartographer must tromp over the land with his sextant and subdue its measurements under his objective eye. It's impossible for women to be objective about themselves, especially in matters of love."

He sighed heavily and wrung his hands, continuing with his speech. "Women run away from an outright declaration of love. Women love the man they cannot have, the one who threatens them, the one who takes a mistress and then throws her into their face. But you, now Erik has you where you cannot run away, where you will have to listen." Then he pointed his black silk face towards the vaulted ceiling and cried out, "I didn't want to do this! I didn't want to force her here! Oh, I am the foulest and most cursed of men, an ape masquerading as a man, no better than a brute who carries off his prey into the forest. I am a damned soul crawling up from the muck and daring to touch, daring to contaminate this exquisite beauty with my paws." As he said this he thrashed his body wildly back and forth.

It was a horrible to see and worse to hear. He grew more abasive, calling himself a cur and a wild thing, unfit for human society. I shrank to the back of the chair, thinking that if he was as depraved as he said, he would not hesitate to work his will with me. "You must let me go," I said. "If you feel towards me as I think you do, then please, I beg, please let me go."

His glittering insect eyes fixed on me. "Why should I let you go? You're here now, and you must listen to me. If I let you go, I will never see you again."

"That isn't so," I lied. The first cock had crowed, and now we were matched. "I could see you after performances. You could take me to supper. I have heard you on the violin, and you play exquisitely. We could perform together, perhaps."

The last set him to wailing, as if I had stabbed him or subjected him to electric shocks, his body quivered so terribly. "Oh, naïve girl, perform with you. In hell, perhaps, for that is the only place in which Erik would stand up before an audience and perform." He turned on me and put his face very close to mine as he sunk down before me on his knees. At that point I could have ripped both it and wig away, but I remembered his injunction. Also, if he conversed with me, as dreadfully wrenching as it was, he wasn't assaulting me.

He swept his arm across his body as if he wanted to annihilate everything, to wipe it away utterly. "I am not interested in your supper clubs, in your parties, in performing like a monkey for the dregs of Paris high society. Before you I lay something far greater, something which drowns the fleshpots of Paris in its marvellous and terrible shadow. Before you I place something I have presented to no woman before, for no woman has been as pure, as exquisite, as sublime an artist as you. Before you, Christine Daae, I rip from my breast my heart, and rest it at your feet."

Then he really did lay himself at my feet, in the position of a Mohammedan in prayer. Through the soft fabric of my shoes pressed up against his mask, his muffled words went on, "For months I have wanted to speak to you as a man does to a woman, and for months my faint heart has betrayed me. But now you are here, and I beg you to stay with me, I beg you, please."

"Monsieur Erik. You know this is impossible. For one thing, I'm a girl with an honest reputation. You mentioned mistresses. If you have watched me for months as you say, then you know I am no man's mistress and will not be one. You cannot demand that I stay with you in your apartments, with no chaperone."

Ragged and sarcastic, he laughed, "Oh, you have a chaperone indeed. Erik will be your chaperone."

Perhaps another bid for freedom would succeed. Accordingly I rose, "I'm afraid I don't find that amusing, Monsieur. If you love me as you say you do, then you will permit me to return to my home, and you will call upon on me as any other suitor."

"You have other suitors? Others beside that mama's boy in uniform, whose milk-fed face looks like he belongs at a tea party, served up next to the watercress sandwiches?" His breath came in harsh gasps.

"No, of course not," I retreated. "Nor is Raoul my suitor," and I thought, the cock has crowed for the second time, has it not?

He turned abruptly and crossed his arms across his chest. "What made you think I would keep you here against your will? Didn't I tell you that as long as you left the mask alone, you were perfectly safe? I'll show you the way out immediately. Foolish girl, thinking I would force you stay overnight with a man you barely know, or at least do not know face to face," and he gave again that horrible ragged laugh. Then tenderly he beseeched, "But you won't forget your Erik, will you? You won't forget to come and see him again? You won't turn him away when he comes begging to your dressing room for another music lesson, another chance?"

Confused, I stood up shakily. "So I am free to go? You'll take me back now?"

"Of course. Just let me clear away this bottle. Unless you would like some more, perhaps?"

I sat down again. He wished to test me, very well, I would test him in return. If he truly intended to give me my freedom, another half hour would not hurt, or so I thought. I cringe as I put these words on the page. Across the decades I call to that girl, that slim young blonde with no more brains than the horse which carried her downward, get out while you can. But instead my younger self sat on the plush chair and calmly accepted another ginger beer.

"It's very good," he said, "from a small brewery in London. It's the perfect refreshment for one's lady guests as it is not too sweet, not too intoxicating."

"So you entertain ladies here often, Monsieur Erik?"

"Not here," he said quietly. "Never here. You are the first," and he looked away, his shoulders furtively hunched as if he had said too much.

With honest reflection, I, the faded woman that used to be Christine Daae, celebrated singer of Paris, know with the certainty of death that had I walked out that door that evening, he would not have stopped me. So much destiny was laid that night upon the shoulders of a young woman, sheltered and vain and self-centered. So many lives changed. Who would have lived? Certainly Raoul's brother, and all the children of his loins. Who would have never been, never set foot on this earth to play or dream or wonder or love? My dark iris Philippe, rogue blossom wild in my garden, my baby, my own. It's the wisdom of God that we have no power to choose, and no power to see ahead to exercise that choice.

He drew up a harp, exquisitely carved, and sang Desdemona's willow ballad from Rossini's _Otello_. Within it swirled arabesques and inventions of his own, little spirals of sound that wrapped me in their coils. His voice was almost as high as an alto in the upper ranges, but he kept his volume low, scarcely above a whisper. Hearing his voice projected through a wall compared in no way to the rich, caressing sound produced an arm's length from me. His capability astonished me, because it is far more difficult to sing softly than to bellow out at one's full volume.

The backdrop of the willow song is a thick and coming storm, but he sang it gently and more softly with each repetition, so that as I closed my eyes momentarily, I could almost see a breeze moving the long leaves of a solitary willow at twilight.

Then he left Desdemona's song for a time and went off further into his own invention, then returned to it again. I felt myself growing sleepy, as the theme ebbed and flowed over me. He stopped playing to cover me with a deep magenta wool shawl of good thickness and softness, then resumed precisely where he had left off. I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes, and the softness of his playing and his singing covered me like the wool in a caressing blanket of warmth.

When I woke, the gaslights were turned very low. I was cold and incredibly stiff, with that sticky, revolting feeling that comes from sleeping in your clothes. Close around me pressed the walls of a small bedroom room I had never seen, which looked like nothing I expected. The elaborate Arabic music had stimulated my imagination before kissing my eyelids with sleep, and I half thought to find myself in some richly appointed seraglio of cushions and embroidered curtains.

Instead, the furniture was plain but beautiful, made of a brown wood that glowed with red highlights, as if a flame played constantly on it. I opened the wardrobe, and discovered several garments hanging on pegs, as well as several pairs of boots neatly arranged underneath. An embroidered coverlet that looked Turkish or Moorish, with curves and loops in blue and yellow covered the sleigh bed.

The bed was undisturbed, as was my person, which I confirmed with a frantic check of all my clothing. If he had wanted to abuse or ravish me, he could have easily done it last night, when I fell asleep on the chaise. Obviously he had carried me to the couch but left me otherwise unmolested. As stiff and scratchy as I felt, it was better than a freezing midnight walk back to a chill flat. Then there was the remarkable beauty of his voice, which until now I had only heard through the walls of my dressing room. In person it had so much more luxuriance, embellished by the movements of his head and arms, which conveyed similar richness of feeling. I wanted to hear that rejuvenated voice again and again, and then the overwhelming thought occurred to me - not only would I hear it again if I stayed. I could sing with him as well.

He had removed my short soft boots and laid them neatly at the foot of the chaise lounge. The clock on the shelf said 1:10, but there was no way to tell how long I had slept, or whether it was night or morning. I went to explore my bedroom, and in the vanity table drawer I found a little wrapped sewing kit with a small but exceedingly sharp pair of scissors. Through a little door I saw the bath, and gasped in pleasure. The clawfoot tub appeared to be twice the size of the one in our flat. I turned on the water, and almost cried out. Hot and cold water both! The luxury of the gleaming white tile, the cheerful brass fittings, the glowing cut-glass lamps, and a Turkish towel of cushiony softness all invited me in. All the room lacked was a mirror. I laughed a little to myself, braver now over my adventure. I knew women could be seduced by flattery, and appealing eyes, a mobile firm mouth which dropped kisses, but had never heard of the use of a bath. Was Erik to seduce me with a bath?

I almost ran to my bedroom door, curious to see if he had already woken. The handle moved in my grip, but the door did not open. I twisted it to the left, then the right, thinking it was stuck, perhaps due to the damp. The door itself never budged, no matter how I twisted the brass fixture, or pulled, or pounded my hand along the doorjam to unstick it. I cried out, I hammered on the door, I hit it with my boot, leaving long black marks. Despite the effort, the door remained firmly stuck.

A red rage filled me. I picked up one of the footstools and pounded the door with it, crying out now, "Erik! Where are you? Let me out, you liar, you foul scoundrel." One of the stool's legs broke off and flew across the room, but the door remained unscathed, as it was made of thick, solid oak.

Oh, the liar, I thought, fighting down the panic. The filthy liar, telling me I was free to go. On my own head I heaped reproaches. I should have left last night, when it seemed that freedom really was within my grasp. Panic won the struggle, making me pant with terror. It was no consolation that he had left my clothes and person unscathed the night before. Doubtless he had some more elaborate seduction planned, some more refined tableau of sensuality prepared, one that required time and reflection.

And a victim, I thought. Pulling on the door as if it might have magically unlocked of its own accord, and finding it as firmly secured as ever, I sank to the floor weeping in shame and terror.

(_continued_...)


	8. Prisoner of Love

**Prisoner of Love**

I woke to find myself locked like a rabbit in a hutch, five cellars down below the National Opera. Crouched in front of the solid oak door in that ordinary bedroom, I cried and called myself all sorts of names, stupid, blockhead, blind as a bat. I had long suspected that Erik was not an angel, but chose not to peer too closely down that particular dark hallway of truth, for fear of finding some. Instead, he claimed to be a man who deceived me out of love. He was right, of course, as I probably would have ignored him like all the others, had he sent me notes and flowers. So many did, after my indifferent little performances as Stefano or Siebel.

It was not so much that he was as ordinary a man as this underground chamber was an ordinary bedroom. Ordinary men do not suffer demotions from angel to man. Instead, injured pride stabbed me. Someone had tricked me, caught me out, taken advantage of my good and gullible feelings.

To him had I poured out my heart and soul, all my longing for poor dead Papa, all my suffering under the snubs and insults of Carlotta's claque, all my fears for my future as Mama Valerius's health declined. He had told me nothing of himself, but it didn't matter. Here at last was a friend, a confidant who understood my heavily accented French and never asked me to repeat words, who always showed patience with me both in music and in my little recitations of cares and woes.

In front of that uncompromising door, I tried to remember my first suspicion that human agency lay behind "the Voice." It wasn't when I practically skipped with delight into my dressing room because I had seen Raoul de Chagny again. Rather, it was after the Voice had been teaching me for about six weeks. I had rehearsed Schumann the previous afternoon for a revue. Too often I stumbled on one or other of the German phrases, until in exasperation Carlotta called out, "Why can't you get it right, Daae? You're such a little Prussian, anyway, it should be easy for you."

"She's a Swede," one of them laughed.

"Swedish, Prussian, what's the difference?" Carlotta snapped. "With that gabble of hers, she should get the German straight. Then we can be done that much sooner. It's almost time for the first show at the Chartreuse Cat."

The rehearsal shut down in shocked silence. It was one thing for a woman to call another a _petit cochon_ if her costume was a little tight, or a scarecrow if too loose, or to make a rude remark about her hair. But ten years after France's humiliating loss to the Prussians, Carlotta's comment still implied a dreadful insult. Even her claque sat open-mouthed. I looked around for one friendly eye, one face not closed as wax-work, but found none. Tears filled my eyes and I could no longer read the score in front of me. I fled the hall.

The next morning, when I appeared for our lesson limp and dispirited, my "Voice" knew at once that something was wrong. At first I didn't want to tell him, but he gently prodded and pried until I relented. From him came an extended hiss like a tea-kettle just starting to boil, the long drawn-in breath of a terrible anger. Then the hiss cut off abruptly, as if "the Voice" feared such a display of passion revealed too much. You knew it from then on, I told myself. But it was so much more delightful to believe in a magical "voice," than a man filled with obsession.

He is going to take off that mask, I resolved. And then I am getting out of here.

I gathered myself together and once more explored the room. There seemed to be no escape unless my captor released me. Even though I tightly gripped the small scissors from the sewing kit, never did I deceive myself that I was any physical match for the man who imprisoned me. The minutes dragged on, and so did my melancholy thoughts. I resolved that if I got out of here, I would never come back to the Garnier Opera again. I would tear my contract up in their faces.

My watch had stopped. Time passed, but how much? Bored, I explored the room again, then opened the mahogany armoire for a closer look inside. A beautiful grey dinner dress hung there. Made of some dark, smoke-colored wool and linen mix, with no ornamentation whatsoever, it fell soft and flexible as India cotton. Rather than buttoning up in the back, which would require a lady's maid, it had ties in the side that lay cleverly flat and concealed, making it possible not only to slip over the head, but to adjust the tightness. It was adjustable enough even to be worn without a corset. That certainly showed the shameful thoughts of its designer, to suggest such immodesty. What dressmaker made this? I wondered, having never seen anything its equal.

I fingered the fine fabric and knew at once that he had designed it, planned it so that the wearer could dress herself without help, and still look elegant. He made it for me. He's prepared this for a long time.

That was when he came in, and not through the bedroom door. The wall itself on the other side of the room opened seamlessly, the ingress hidden in the pattern of the wainscoting. I jumped back with a gasp, flustered that he'd caught me looking in the armoire, embarrassed that I'd admired that which should have horrified and disgusted me. His arms were full of awkwardly balanced packages, and he left the door open behind him. One parcel fell to the floor, and when he stooped to retrieve it, I flew past him, thinking to escape through that hidden portal.

Swiftly and effortlessly he whirled about, then thrust forward his shoulder and hip. All the force I'd mustered in my flight was turned against me as I collided with a body unyielding as a wrought-iron gatepost. I spun off him and thudded against the open armoire door, slamming the side of my head against the hard mahogany. Gape-mouthed and dazed I stood while he placed the packages painstakingly on the bed. He carefully closed the door, which seamlessly disappeared into the wainscoting, and trapped me with his eyes. Or rather, where eyes might have been. Instead, there were only two tiny glittering points in the cavernous blackness, made darker by the full-faced mask.

"You can't keep me here," I said angrily, trying to ignore my throbbing head.

He disregarded that remark and said instead, "Christine, do you have any idea of the time? It's almost two o'clock in the afternoon, and you look as if you have spent the night in the alleyway behind the Opera, serving as the tomcats' frowzy prey."

"What do you expect?" I snapped. "You locked me in." It hurt, that I still heard the voice of my teacher, my friend, who came so close to my heart. This was the voice that told me stories of angels, who described the angelic life in the heavenly realms so clearly, so blissfully, that it made me long for death myself just to experience it. Now he not only locked me up but mocked me as well.

"I've prepared a table for you, but it hardly seems fitting to break your fast in a theater costume," and his eyes swept over my legs not with lechery but scorn.

Confused, I stammered, "Someone will miss me. They'll come looking for me."

"When you do your hair," he went on, as if I hadn't spoken at all, "don't knot it so tightly in the back. I'm glad you had the sense never to go in for those ridiculous spit-curls. They make one look like a ragged little poodle. Keep it instead soft and natural," and he reached out to move a tendril of hair across my forehead.

I slapped his spidery hand aside as hard as I could. "Madame Valerius will call the police!" I shouted.

"I don't think so," he said lazily, ignoring the blow, "as I took the liberty last night of writing to her. I explained that you had gone away with your angel of music for an extended visit, and that you would be returned to her spiritually renewed and an even better singer than when you left. Monsieur Moncharmin has been informed that due to the strain of witnessing the chandelier crash, you require a leave of absence to regain your composure. He's well aquainted with the nervousness of artists. Besides, it's in your contract that you may take a leave of absence from the opera for reasons of your health."

"The only threat to my health so far," I said icily, "has been you." Then I thought of Mama Valerius, delivered from the worry that I knew would have followed. "But I thank you for writing Mama."

He nodded gracefully. "You will bathe now," he said abruptly, gesturing towards the bathroom, "and then you will dine with me."

I thought of arguing, but squirmed with irritation at the scummy clamminess of the renaissance-style boy's costume. Wordlessly I nodded, and he left through the main door, the visible one, but did not lock it. As soon as he left I turned the bolt, and then ran over to the far wall. Careful feeling showed me where the door was. A small louvered window sat up high on the wall, right below the ceiling and directly above the invisible door. However, its slats were closed and nothing could be seen on the other side of the glass. There's some kind of passageway to the outside through that door, I thought. However, there seemed to be no way to open it or make it unlatch.

In later years I played this scene over and over in my mind, like a rehearsal for the performance which never came. As the children grew and made their feeble little stabs at lying (always strenously deflected by Raoul or myself), I grew to understand what was born of deception and what came of impulse.

The bureau drawers were empty, yet a dress and fine slippers had hung in his armoire. That told my clearer, older head that he had not planned to necessarily bring me to his apartments when he did.He was not expecting me to be wearing a breech role boy's costume, but instead assumed I would have my own underthings and boots for trodding the slushy Paris streets. The dress and slippers were purely gifts, to win my confidence and admiration.

His own participation in the chandelier disaster was a mystery to me at the time. Later, when I learned of his agency, it became clear to me that he planned the chandelier crash independently of my visit. It was after he witnessed the screaming and the blood, the glass and the destruction, that we both felt the same compulsion to rush to each other's side. It was then, I surmised, that he decided to act and bring me to him.

Back in that cold tile room so long ago, I drew the bathwater. A jar of salts sat on a shelf and I absently tossed some in, enjoying their rich lavendar scent. I carried the little scissors with me, points open and ready to stab.

I soaked in the bath for a long time, dunking my head and letting the hair float up onto the surface. At first I thought I'd take the scissors directly into the bathwater with me, but some old prudent respect for tools kept me from getting their small sharpnesses wet. I balanced them on the rim of the tub where I could reach them easily. The thought of actually sticking one of their razored points into my flesh, or into Erik's, for that matter, made me queasy. Perhaps if he did enter the bath, I could nick myself enough to make him think I was serious, or slice him enough to make him think twice. However, he did not seem to be a man who would be frightened by blood.

So much easier to lie back in the fragrant tepid water, rather to face my captor, or to decide how to escape. I listened hard but under the earth was free of apartment noises. There were no tromping footsteps on the stairs; no clapping hooves on stone; no calls or cries from the street. Other than the faint hiss of the gas jets, the splash of bath water, and a ringing echo in the pipes when I turned on the water, the room was blanketed in utter silence. I strained to hear him moving about, but there was nothing, not even the click and creak of the door that I expected at any moment.

I couldn't stay in the bath forever.

The bedroom was empty as I crept about apprehensively in a thick white towel almost as large as a bedsheet and of unparalleled warmth. I rested my ear against the bedroom door, hoping to gain some clue to my jailer's movements. Nothing came through but silence. I dragged a heavy wingbacked chair over to the door and lodged it in front. It wouldn't be enough to keep him out if he wanted entry, but it would give me time to grab my little weapon and draw some blood.

My curiosity overcame me, for the packages from the _Au Printemps_ department store lay on the bed, smelling faintly of lilacs. _Au Printemps_ shopgirls dressed more beautifully than the women of the theater. Sneering at their women customers made their noses grow unnaturally long, although they turned up smartly when fawning on the men. These elaborate creatures worked there only if they were kept by some banker or lawyer who provided their beautiful clothes, as they did not earn enough to buy them for themselves. Both the prices and the sales girls frightened me. I had wandered about several times under the department store's great glass skylight, but each time came away empty-handed, feeling like a clumsy, ill-dressed, clod-hoppered peasant.

Inside the fragrant paper were underclothes of the finest quality cotton. Several of the chemises had insets of _guipure_ embroidery, the tiniest work I had ever seen. Under the stack of chemises was a side-lacing corset, and a slim negligee of tender silk. A little note fluttered out as I opened the nightgown's package, telling me that the quality of this silk was such that it could be passed through a ring with no difficulty. It was true – the entire garment slid through my mother's silver filigree band like water through the neck of a funnel.

The clerks no doubt thought he was buying lingerie for a mistress, and I blushed again, first with shame and then with furious anger. How dare he make some shopgirl imagine what the lucky recipient was like, perhaps even envy her and wish that lovely piece of Egyptian cotton was for her. Did she flirt with him as he picked each piece up, testing its softness between his lizard-cold fingers? When she asked for the size, did he look her over and say, A little smaller than you? At least she got to see his face, or so I thought then, while he hid it from me like a thief.

Wrapped in tissue were two pairs of stockings in dove-grey, made to match the beautiful dress in the armoire. As I handled them, their fine silk snagged on the tiniest flake of dry skin. With them were two embroidered ribbon garters light as a spider's web. He considered everything, didn't he?

I went to the vanity table and there, as if some _djinn_ had made it appear at my command, rested a tiny jar of hand cream. It smelled of lemons as it melted into the skin of my palms, richly warming the skin under my finger's strokes. That will keep me from snagging those stockings, I thought, and then I slammed the little jar down. Why should I care about them? I should rip them to shreds in front of him. If I were a man, I'd wrap them around his neck. But I hungered for fine things, for soft fabrics and rich scents, and it seemed wrong to deliberately destroy anything that beautiful.

There were also two pairs of shoes at the bottom of the closet - ladies' dress boots for tromping about the streets of Paris, and a pair of soft leather slippers, fine enough for dancing at the Tuileries Palace, had it not been reduced to a rubble-strewn wreck in the war. I dressed. Never had I worn a corset so light, or a chemise so fine, with cotton woven so tightly I could barely see the weaving.

To complete the effect required earrings, and there on the vanity table rested a grey velvet box. As in one of Scherezade's stories, opening the jewelry box revealed a dangling pair crafted of antique silver. My hands trembled as I slid the delicate teardrops into the holes of my ears. Now to see what my host had wrought. Curiously, there was no mirror on the vanity table, not even a hand mirror in the drawers. But inside the armoire, on the back of one of the doors, was a three-quarter length long one. Stained with specks, flawed in the silver, its dust coating proclaimed it long forgotten.

Stunned, I admired my image. In those days I had a kind of delicate cornflower-and-cream prettiness, but in the man in black's _ensemble _I glimmered with a rare beauty. The grey of the dress made my eyes look smoky instead of their normal bright blue, and my hair shone like a blonde-white flame. I was pale in those days, so pale. One little blue vein pulsed at my temple, and another crept up from my neck, threads running through marble. Venus might have drawn out a marmoreal woman for Pygmalion, but this mysterious man had cast into marble a woman of pale icy beauty. Previously I had envied other girls their full bosoms and round arms, their curved hips. Now, I raised my arms and did a few swaying movements, admiring the slender fairy who wavered thin and wispy as mist in the warped old mirror.

Shaking and troubled, I stepped back. A few moments ago only one purpose filled me, to fly past my captor and escape. Now everything seemed muddled and confused. I took stock of myself, and my situation. No one had molested me last night. He hadn't entered when I bathed. With his strength and height, he could have forced himself upon me anytime he wished. But he had not.

On the other hand, I had to admit, I honestly had little memory of the trip down here, especially on horseback. It's not my fault, I told myself. It was some drug that weakened my resolve. The only memory I could fish from that foggy pond of dreams was of his strong arms keeping me upright on Cesar, arms that pulled me close into him when I slipped and was about to fall. His body was neither wraithlike, nor icy like his toadlike hands, but warm like any man's.

No wonder he thinks he can make himself so familiar, I thought with furious blushes. On horseback, did I really lean back into his arms as if I were used to lying there every night? Did he wrap his arms tightly around my waist, to further hold me onto Cesar's rocking, rolling back? Did I imagine that he gripped my hips with his thighs, as if the horse and I were one? I could not remember. It was all lost in the fog. All that remained was a soft echo of drugged pleasure.

Through the other side of the door, the weight of his waiting pressed on me. A few centimeters of oak separated me from that endlessly patient presence, anticipating talking to me, eating the supper he'd prepared. This is so unusual, I thought. The singers and dancers have their patrons, their protectors, their lovers, but no one has been in quite a situation as this. A great sensation of exploring an unknown country overwhelmed me, and for the first time I knew why fallen women were called "adventuresses." This wasn't a stranger, after all. I had not seen him until last night, but this was a man who knew me, whom I knew, even if I had not known him as a man.

He was wrong to trick me into coming here, of course. Still, he had taken me out of the cramped confines of my own life and cast me into the sky to soar on musical wings. Further, he cut a fine figure in his long lean black clothes, even though his face and head hid under wig and mask. Perhaps he's bald, I thought. Some men are vain about it, and wear wigs even today. So I went on, telling myself one fond nursery tale after another, until I accumulated enough courage to open that door and face him.

He had set a table for us, a white sparkling confection of silver and candles and lead crystal rimmed with gold. When I entered the room he stood, and I heard again that long hissing breath, fueled now not by anger but admiration. He looked at me as if a sculpture crafted by his hand had walked across the room on her own accord.

" 'White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,' " he whispered.

"I don't recognize that," I said, touched.

"Swinburne, an Englishman, from whose well I draw often. He and Lord Byron are the only two worth reading."

"I don't know either one."

"Stay with me, and you will," he said in low tones.

All lights save the fire and the table's candelabra had been extinguished. When he pulled my chair out his hands trembled. His eyes glittered like two gold coins in the dark deep hollows, drachmae in the eyes of the dead, and I shivered, but tender attention soon dispersed the chill. He filled my glass, retrieved my napkin when it fell, sprinkled pepper on my salad, then placed a dish of garlic prawns and rice in front of me. A wicked thought bubbled up: if he could have chewed for me, he would have. I bit my inner lip to keep from laughing. Not a move of mine went unanticipated.

"It's too much wine for one person," I remarked as he poured a little more Tokay into my glass. "Won't you have some with me?"

"I cannot eat or drink, knowing that you want to go."

"Tell me why I should stay."

"Because in five days' time, we can do more with your voice than we could in three months' of work upstairs," by which he meant up in my dressing room. "Sound does not float through the air, bodiless. The movement of air is sound itself, and nothing moves the air save the action of a body. Bodies make sounds, not fleshless spirits. Do you know how thick air is, Christine? It seems insubstantial, ghostlike, but it is not. It compresses us every second, on every square centimenter of everything live or dead. Just as light moves between the stars through the vibrations of the lumeniferous ether, so the sound from your tender throat comes from a body, and goes to another, where it registers on the ear, but penetrates to the heart.

"Were you to stay, I could watch your throat, your movements. I could see the breath leave your mouth, watch it hang in the air before it flew over to one heart or another. Not with my eyes would I see that soft cloud, but with the vision of my ears, with the vision of my heart. Were it to go amiss, I could guide it back on its proper path, steer it with the tiniest movements. If you stay for five days, it will amaze you how you will sound. What you did at the National Conservatory will seem like the play of children with blocks in the nursery."

"Why is it necessary for me to stay here? Could we not continue to work in my dressing room?"

"Five days is not so long. What else would you do? Sit in a cafe? Darn your stockings? Go to yet another rehearsal of stale, unimaginative Meyerbeer?"

I cut into a chicken wing, its tender meat marinated in the same wine which I drank, and considered. It would take at least a week for the ruin of the chandelier to be repaired. During that time there would be no performances. There was Raoul, however. "There is one more friend I have to write," I said defiantly.

"Who?" he demanded.

"It's not your concern. Since it's most clear you are not an angel from heaven, do you still believe you can choose my friends?" I thought back to his prohibition of worldly pursuits and friends outside of my art, with the threat that he would "return to heaven" if I continued them. He seemed to be in no danger of unfurling his wings and ascending now.

He jerked spasmodically, and while his already inky and unreflective mask could not have grown any blacker, the atmosphere around him suddenly waxed heavy and oppressive. "Five days, Christine. Then it will be up to you what pleasures of the world you wish to pursue. Raoul de Chagny can no doubt find sufficient diversions to amuse him for five days. I deceived you, it's true. Now, I tell you exactly what is in my heart, my heart that is cut into pieces by a single strand of your pale hair. For that fatal wire pulls ever tighter around it, and I cannot breathe for love. If you stay with me for five days, I will let you go. Erik won't force you to come back, even. But if you let me give to you that part of our art which only bodies can bestow, then perhaps you will not want to stay away, ever."

He had already deceived me once about being able to come and go, so I was suspicious. "What if after five days I should decide to leave Paris?"

He interlaced his fingers, forming a ten-legged spider that threatened to trap me in its sticky web. "I do not think you will," he said softly. "But you would be free to."

"You told me that I was free to go last night, and yet I woke to find myself locked in my room," I pouted.

"Tell me what you would have done, had you left your bedroom and found me gone."

"I would have found my way back upstairs, to the Opera," I said primly.

"Really," he said drily, leaning back in his chair. "And how would you have accomplished that?"

I sat, stunned. Even if I could have maneuvered his boat through the underground lake, which was doubtful, how would I have known where to disembark? The canals themselves were like a maze, as I recalled from my fog. Then there were pathways to find, stairs to climb, corridors to navigate. A small town could have fit underneath the National Opera, but at least in a town one could find a friendly face, a guide to find one's way. I remembered he carried a lantern, and that some of the passageways were very dark. Finally I said, "I see. I don't know the way. I could have been lost." Then a horrible thought struck me. "When you went out to shop, what did you expect me to do if you had been hit by a carriage? I would have been entombed down here."

"My chances of being hit by a carriage were far less than the chances of you wandering out and falling into the lake, or breaking your leg on slippery stones, or meeting some of the others that live down here. They are not so civilized as Erik."

"Others?" I asked, gulping.

He told me of the wars in France in 1870 and 1871, when Paris was besieged by the Prussians, and the Opera House was used as an armory and supply depot. Then during the partisan revolution it was occupied by the Communards, who used it as a prison, stockade, and even torture chamber. Throughout both wars he himself hid in the cellars of the unfinished Opera, and he was not the only one, although only a few stayed after the Communard revolutionaries were disposed of, either by execution or exile.

"After the uprising, the gardens of Versailles ran red with the blood of the executed, and not all who lost their heads had defied the Third Republic. This is a good place for them to hide. Some day they will proclaim an amnesty, but for now..." and he shrugged, his point made.

Suddenly the inside of this apartment felt very safe. "Were you on the barricades with the Communards yourself?" I asked. "You said you were in Paris during the war, so what did you do?"

"You are so full of questions. From Pandora on downward, it is the hallmark of your species."

"Of course I am curious. How often does one meet a man who lives underneath a theater? Look, I don't care what side you were on, if that's what worries you. I was a child, and I didn't even live in France then, after all."

"The only side I was on, the only side I am on, is Erik's side," he said shortly. "It took all Erik's efforts to stay out of the way of both the National Guard and the Communards alike. I had no interest in their stupid causes, their revolutions, their emperors or kaisers or presidents. Had the Prussians taken the city, I would have found a way to elude them as well. I used to wish the Prussians would take Paris, then at least these infernal interruptions to my work would cease."

"And what might that work be?"

He waved his long, elegant hand around, that hand whose skin glistened cold and waxlike as a corpse's. "You see around you these walls, this multitude of stories and the stairs which link them, and the lake which we crossed. When Garnier's men first dug into the foundation here, they hit a veritable swamp of groundwater. The more they dug, the faster they dug, the more the water filled in. For all their academy training, they couldn't seem to calculate the flow of water through a pipe, and Monsieur Bernoulli spun in his grave until Erik came upon the scene. I designed and built the great tub that houses this lake, the pumps which fill and empty it daily, and I connected it to the sewers of Paris. Even when Paris was sieged and the sewers blocked, I had inlet and egress to the city, as if those fools' politics could keep me ensconced."

"You helped build this place?" I asked, astonished.

He shrugged, as if it were a minor distraction. "That was the work of my daily bread. But there are other types, such as the work which occupies one's mind, and then," he paused, deeply sighing, "then there is the work of the heart." He turned to me, leaning forward, and all his intense focus seized me in its steely grip. "I give you a choice, Christine. My daily work you saw all around you every day, and in your heartless innocence you knew not that it was even mine. But man lives not by bread alone," and he gave a snide little chuckle. "Which would you like to see now, the work of my mind, or the work of my heart?"

I nodded, trembling as if on the verge of some great mystery. "Either."

"I have never shown this to anyone," he said. "Erik has never shown it to any of the others. It remains here, in the heart of my rooms. But I show it to you, because I love you."

"Please," I said. "You don't have to tell me that."

"But why not?" he cried.

"Because I don't wish you to. Because if you beg me like this, it will make me not want to come back."

"Then you will stay?" he asked, anxiety rising from his body like a cloud. I didn't need to see his face to know his mood. "If I mention it no more, you will stay with me for five days? If you do, Erik will be gentle with you, and your person will be utterly safe. Your room will be your own, the room with my poor dead mother's furniture, the bed in which I was born and where she died. If you stay with me, you'll find that you'll never be troubled by ennui. I know stories, Christine, and more songs than you imagine. There is a whole world down here, and I can show it to you.

"I beg you ... " and he stretched his hand out to me, but I shrunk back, shaking my head. "No, he said, "you are a pure woman, not like the others. I presume nothing, expect nothing of you. Be safe in your room, Christine, and secure in your dressing room as well, when you do return to Paris. Erik will not spy upon you, as he did before. No more talk of love, then, unless you offer it yourself."

He gave a little half-choked sob, and wetness streaked down and collected at the bottom of the thin dark cloth which covered his face. The flexible mask stuck to his chin, which seemed sharper and more bony than a chin should have been. A thin thread of tear crept down to the ascot, tied up so closely to his face as to make the neck almost entirely invisible.

I didn't know what to say. As I told Raoul later, he had placed a great love at my feet. It was not the same as having love confessed by a stranger, for this wasn't a stranger. This was "my Voice," this tense strange man who picked up my fears one by one and gently laid them aside. Then neither of us spoke, until he rose and held his hand out again. "What will it be, first the heart and then the mind, or first the mind and then the heart?"

It shames me now, as it did not then, but I could not take that hand. Papa's dead flesh, the memory of a smell, but most of all, the fear that if our fingers touched his good resolutions would vanish, all these kept my hand at my side. He lurched away in an attitude of terrible hurt, pulling the rejected hand close to his vest, and said, "Never mind, of course you would not touch Erik's hand, you are a good woman, forgive me, forgive me."

He can't help it if his hands are cold, I thought. He is lonely, and lovely to listen to.

"Your heart," I breathed. "I want to see your heart's work."

"It's in my bedroom," he said, hesitating, watching me carefully. "If you choose not to enter, I will understand."

"It's all right," I said. "I trust you will keep your word and behave with honor."

"Then come," he gestured dramatically, "and you will see the work of Erik's heart."

Opening a door previously closed to me, he stepped aside to let me in.

(_continued_...)


	9. Fire from Heaven

**Fire From Heaven**

Erik's bedchamber was dim. Red silks like membranes hung over all the lampshades, casting an inflamed sheen on the dark walls and floor. I thought of dried blood staining the skirt of a black dress.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light. In the center of the room stood a massive bed cut into the shape of a coffin. It would have fit a giant tightly, making it large enough for a man to lie down or roll about in. Bedcurtains of dark red gauze draped around it. Through that waterfall of blood, the inside of his bed was spread with white sheets of satin and lined with white velvet, just as a real coffin was.

"The monks of old built their final resting places out of pine wood, and then slept in them," he remarked.

"I don't think theirs were quite so luxurious," I retorted.

"Luxurious or not, it reminded them of death. When they took their deaths into their hearts, a great paradox occurred, Christine. Inside them opened a space vast enough to contain the world, and no fear of death was left in them. It wasn't enough for them to lie down in those coffins, no, they were to think of themselves cold and motionless. They were to hear the lid being nailed down, blow by blow, and feel the thud of the first spade of earth that would bury them until the final trumpet's call. One after another rained down the clods of earth that would make them food for worms."

I could stand it no longer. On his walls hung wide pieces of what looked like Japanese rice paper. Sprawling words seemed to have been splashed on with a mop, with specks and splatters of black ink everywhere. I strained in the red dark to read what was written there. Giving up, I asked, "What does it say?"

Slowly and solemnly he intoned,

"_Dies iræ, dies illa,_

"_Solvet sæclum in favilla..."_

He chanted beautifully. I stumbled over the Latin, "Day of wrath, day of gloom, all of earth shall fire consume..."

"Very good," he said, teacher praising the favorite pupil.

On a raised dais stood an organ covered with sheet music, staff paper, pens. In the center of the clutter, as if it had been the last item handled, stood a quatro-sized red leather notebook. I hesitated to touch it, but he nodded encouragingly.

"_Don Juan Triumphant_?" I read aloud. Inside, thousands of little red notes tumbled over one another, ants spilling out of their hill after the naughty boy pours water down the hole. There were scores for violin, for cello, the oboe, the French horn. Then came the vocal scores, the arias, the choruses. It made my head swim, for while I prided myself on my sight-singing and reading, this jagged maze of notes suggested nothing to me.

Every few measures seemed to have a different tempo, a different key signature, and the modulations made no sense. He had interspersed the text with a notation of his own invention. In the margins were comments scrawled in large, irregular print. Some of the comments made sense, "Sopr: kp shldrs bk. & chin hi. Tenr: tk hr hand tndrly." But other notes seemed more like mad poetry than stage directions, these red-scribbled pages of chaos and confusion.

He took the folio from my hands lovingly, reverently. "Ah, you found it," he said, voice trembling with emotion. "It is as if you knew. This is the living, beating work of my heart. This is my great composition that has encompassed two decades. When it is completed, my life will be over. There will be nothing left for me afterwards, and with it I shall climb into my bed, my bed of death, and not wake up. The world will never see it, for with me into the grave it shall go. The world will never hear it, for the world would not understand."

"It seems a waste," I remarked. "All that time and work."

"Oh, it has not been two decades straight," he laughed with strange harshness. "I have done other things in between."

"Why is it written in red?"

"I used to live in Persia many years ago," and his voice took on a faraway quality. "There, as in Egypt and Araby and all through the Mohammedan world, those who submit to Allah had a book like our Bible called the Koran. Every man studied it, and even some women. To memorize it was considered a great virtue . Occasionally one of the Persian Mohammedans would succumb to a burst of enthusiasm and open his veins to write verses of that holy book in his own blood. It was considered a great impiety and the offenders were quickly dispatched, often by strangulation ... at least when I was there." Recovering himself to the present, he went on, "But I was not a Mohammedan. For me to open one of my veins, to record the revelation given to me directly from the dark angels that flap like bats around the buttresses, would not have been blasphemous at all."

I pulled my hands back, and wiped them rapidly on my skirt. "You don't mean to tell me that score is written in your blood?" I looked around the room, terror pounding in the veins of my temple.

"Oh, I have frightened you," he said. "Stories of Persia are not for girls of delicate color. I don't know why I brought that up, it's as if I speak and strange things come out of me, for I don't think like other people. No, it's not my blood, but only ordinary red ink. Look, Christine, here is the bottle, and the very pen itself I last used, with the ink still on it."

My heart settled back in my chest. To distract him, to turn my own thoughts away from open veins and blood-writing and strangulation, I touched the cover of the folio and lightly said, "Would you play something for me from your master-work, then? For I can't make it out at all, it's as if it has no melody whatever."

"Melody," he sighed, one of those long drawn-out sighs I came to know so well. "Melody, and harmony, and resolution ... they all point to order, and justice, and coherency. But there really is no order, and worst of all, no justice. Suffering falls upon the innocent from indifferent skies. What Erik has painted with red notes onto this canvas of sound is life itself, life not reduced to pious formulae or submitted to tedious theological explanations, but life that triumphs and spits into the face of a God who inflicts upon it unjust and unbearable suffering. What's written here is life carving out a place for itself."

Shocked, I crossed myself. He saw it and laughed. "Perhaps you prefer Mozart's _Don Giovanni_? Do you enjoy it when he meets his fateful end, dragged kicking and screaming into hell, directed there by that sibyl of stone who points the way? Perhaps you equally enjoy watching Faust carried away by the devil whose plaything he is, instead of winning Helen of Troy?"

"She wasn't real," I interrupted. "She was an illusion at best, an evil spirit at worst."

"You confuse Goethe with the coldness of the English," he snapped. "Goethe's Helen was no cold concatenation of mist, but a living woman of flesh and blood, and they had a child whose name was Joy. A simulacrum cannot produce a son. There are stories here ripped straight out of the heart, and do you know what opera does? It cuts them down, simplifies them, lards them with sentimentality so that old women in spats and top hats will not be offended, even though they themselves do far worse when the curtain falls. We see only the surface, not the depths. My Don Juan Triumphant plumbs the depths, and in the end he prevails."

"But you won't play some of it for me?" I asked coaxingly.

He stood away from me silently, tall and slim in front of the double keyboard, and a little spasm went through my heart. "You've made your career based on freshness and beauty," he said softly, and I had to strain to hear him. "Do you know what the managers said when they debated about offering you a contract?"

"Of course not. How could I? How could you, for that matter?"

"Oh, around here, the walls have ears. I will tell you what they said," and he mocked Poligny's mincing syllables exactly. " 'She sings like an automaton,' Monsieur Poligny commented. 'But she has the face of a seraph, an exquisite beauty made rarer by its purity.' That was a day to mark in one's journal, when Poligny would compliment a woman's face, as it was well-known that Monsieur Poligny's mistresses all had moustaches, and not because they failed to pluck or wax."

" 'Don't worry,' Monsieur Debienne replied. 'Soon enough her face will grow hard as glass. It happens to them all.'

" 'So let's take advantage of this one while it lasts,' Poligny smirked, and Debienne joined him. When they laughed together like that, I wanted to kill them both," and he wrung his hands together as if restraining them.

"I won't risk you hearing these sounds. These are no simple puffs of breath, no delicate whispered syllables. In the desert, the wind whips up the sand so that it cuts flesh from bone. That is the power of moving air, and were you to hear my Don Juan, that wind would carry to your ears a flame. For my Don Juan lives not in Seville but in the desert, and he burns with a clear flame, one that sheds no light but only heat, heat that scorches down into all four corners of the heart. I don't want that heat to burn you, or melt you so that you harden like glass, or turn you into something that you are not. I love you, and yes, your face tells me that I broke my promise, and it is a promise I am afraid I will break over and over again. For if you hear my Don Juan, or worse, if you sing it, I fear you will become burnt and hardened. You will become like Erik."

The room slightly swirled around me. In that maelstrom of black and red, Paris seemed very far away, a small ship adrift on a vast ocean, and only the man provided a solid anchor. He stood with hand on one hip, head cocked, bronze now in the red light rather than cold like iron. Inexplicably, madly, I wanted to dance with him.

"You've drugged me again," I whispered.

"No," he replied. "It is Don Juan's fire that focuses the senses."

"If you will not play some of it for me, will you at least tell me the synopsis?"

"If you stare at the sun," he answered in a low thrilling tone, "it will still burn your eyes, even if you are millions of miles away from it."

"Who are you?" I whispered. "You say you love me. How can I love you, when I can't even see you? How can you show me a coffin set in the middle of a tomb, and expect me to think of anything but death? Do you expect me to love you in a grave?"

"I take my rendezvous wherever I can get them," he said in a soft voice choked with regret.

"Down here, I can't imagine you find any rendezvous at all."

His black impassive face fluttered with heavy breath. "You would be surprised."

Blushing, I said, "Would you play me something from the opera, then?"

Turning on me harshly, he said, "What, Mozart? Or something of Herr Hoffman, perhaps a story of an old magician in love with his favorite pupil? When I think of the stupidity, the waste, the trivia that those fools upstairs call entertainment ..."

"If you dislike the opera so much, Erik," I interrupted, "why do you live here?"

"The real curse of Eve, inflicted on man from generation to generation, is that women are not content to accept that which is presented to them, but angle endlessly for more, always more. Very well, Christine, I will play you something from the opera, and you will sing with me, from the bottom of your narrow little chest out of which we have worked so hard to coax every last vibration of sound."

I crossed my hands in front of my breast protectively, even though he did not leer. Instead, it was I who looked at him with different eyes than when I had first entered the room.

Later, when I would play at jigsaw puzzles with the children, we found that when pieces of the puzzle were missing, the whole puzzle was spoiled. Even one lost piece was enough to make a child weep with frustration. After all that work, the picture still was incomplete. But we don't see things like that in life. When pieces are missing, we fill in the gaps ourselves with details of our own imagining.

While Erik talked or gestured before the keyboards, I gave him a story, the saga of a lost prince, a rejected nobleman, a separation in childhood, a lonely life of exile, desperation and a touch of madness born from tribulation, but due to be all set right in the end, healed by a kiss or a touch. When he twisted his shoulders around sometimes spastically, sometimes gracefully, or when his long spider-like fingers molded the air, the conviction grew in me that under the mask he was beautiful. Something terrible had happened to him to make him hide.

"Something from the opera," he repeated. "I have the very thing, back at the piano. Something that will stir your soul but still allow you to keep your fresh and pretty coloring."

In his haste and agitation, he preceded me out of the room. His tall back narrowed down so rapidly to taut hips swathed in swallowtail. The naïve child of my imaginations and illusionings went with him, riding on his wide and angular shoulders.

He played a prelude, and I shuddered, recognizing it as the beginning of Act III of Rossini's _Otello_.

"Take up your harp, Christine, and start at 'O thou sweet instrument of my grief.'"

"I can't play the harp," I remarked, "and anyway, yours is too big to lift from the floor."

He stared at me momentarily, then said, "I will sing Emilia's few lines, and will later come in as Otello."

I stared back at him. He banged on the piano angrily. When he went through several introductory measures to my silence, he looked hard at me and said in clenched voice, "Sing."

So I began Desdemona's lament, not softly and sweetly as he had sung it for me the night before, but with plaintive wailing. It could not be helped, because I was led by my accompaniest anywhere he wished to go.

Then the great thunderclap rumbled out of the bass notes, followed by the daggerlike shards that blew from Desdemona's window with the approaching storm. The wild music disoriented me, because he no longer played Rossini's accompaniment, but some passionate invention of his own born of the storm, of wind and rain, of the approaching Moor's murderous passion.

He sang, "_Eccomi giunto inosservato e solo_," but in no way did he "arrive unnoticed." When the first syllables pounded the air, my heart leapt like a rabbit set free from its hutch.

"She is not to blame, if my loathsome visage drives her from me, from my shame," he sang. What did Rossini's librettist mean? I had seen North African men in Paris, and they weren't repulsive at all, but instead beautiful with their haunting brown eyes, their long dark noses, their carved smiling lips. His long wig and ink-swathed face swam before me, and only the long white hands racing up and down the keyboard let me know that he was not the Moor himself.

"Why did you not give me, God, a face which matched my heart?" he half-sobbed, the thunder of his voice matching the thunder he teased from the keys, and I sobbed out loud with him.

"My dear love," I breathed, as Desdemona turned in her sleep, embracing Otello in her dream.

Lightning crackled under his fingertips, and when Desdemona awoke, and he called out "False one!" I was ready for him. Desdemona offered him her bosom, crying out, "Pierce me to the core!" and I did the same. But while Desdemona feared Otello and on stage moved away from him, he always advancing, hidden dagger ready to strike, I bent down to Erik and sang into his masked face, making the silk ripple with the force of my breath.

"Non arrestare il colpo ... Hold not your blow," I cried, and spread my arms wide, breast entirely opened to him. "Most cruel of men," I sang, but by now it was a sweet cruelty which animated him, and he pressed me with his voice so that I shook as if he were pressing me with his body.

When I told Raoul of this fateful duet, it was the terror I recounted. But the terror was my character's, not mine.

"Io fremo," he breathed in agony, trembling now with genuine passion, no more acting. He and Otello were one. Never had I heard such. Never had I understood what moved Otello, why he shook and shivered and sobbed with agony. I would have stopped our duet and embraced him right there, but he forged onward with "O dismal night, o cruelest storm," so that his improvisation of thunder and hail rained down and echoed through the room like balls of ricocheting ice.

Closer we moved towards each other, but I dared not touch him, for those wild arms gyrating up and down the keys would have knocked me to the floor. Again I thought to wrap my arms around him and fling my head onto his flat breast. There was no modesty left to stop me. All that held me back was that were I to embrace him, the sensual laceration of singing with him through a storm of scorching ice would stop. Any pleasure I would have had from such an embrace seemed pale in comparison.

Never had we sung like this in our lessons. Never had a man and woman sung this way on stage, not that I had ever heard.

When I commanded, "Take your pleasure, cruel man," I knew what I meant and so did he. He looked me full in the face, and through the eyeholes of his mask I could see his rich dark eyes, glittery and black, and they were opened wide, very wide, for the whites shone entirely around those inky orbs. For a few seconds, the last few seconds of unfettered happiness Erik and I ever shared, he was the Moor, I his beloved, and I would have given him anything, been anyone for him, done anything for him. He shook with deep hunger, and clearly as if he'd spoken, I knew what would conclude our duet. He would take me in his arms, carry me into his room, and under that gauzy red lamina I would yield, and die.

These were my last few seconds of innocence on earth.

Otello's vengeance was completed with his knife plunged to the hilt in Desdemona's pale breast, making the slow stream of her life run down with the rain. Erik leaned his head back, eyes closed, as if wanting to be kissed beneath that black-clad mouth. I stared for a second at his pale eyelids while the long wail, "Alas..." poured from me. He held the notes a long time. Directing me with one hand, sweeping across the keyboard with the other, he drew out my cry of pain into a soaring moan of passion as he stabbed me to the quick, again, again. Dying with Desdemona, I wanted to see the face of he who pierced my soul, the one who would pierce my body.

Everything moved very slowly. Back then I had never seen a film, nothing of that sort had been invented yet, but it was like watching one played more slowly than usual. Moving as if through warm honey, I seized a handful of thin flexible silk and pulled upwards, and as the mask came free, his wig flew off as well.

Time stopped. At first I didn't know what I saw. A grey-white horror swam before me in a confusion of angles and planes and fearsome distorted proportions. In a deluded second I thought that I had pulled his whole head off, leaving behind a whitened, tortured stump. The spider is eaten by his mate from the top down, but he still couples blindly until fulfilled. Like that, Erik's hands moved for the last few seconds more on the keyboard, for Otello's line was not complete. He turned fully towards me, and the last words of Otello flew full of spittle from his mouth, the last chords fell like hammers from his hands.

"_Mori, infidel_."

Even in Erik's headless rage, Otello's last chord must be laid down, complete. Then he stood up slowly, but with such force that the bench crashed to the floor behind him, spreading sheet music all over. He kicked it across the room and I heard it splinter. I stared at the white corrugated surface of his skull, trying to make sense of what I saw, when a stunning blow across the temple sent me spinning to the carpet.

Everything went grey. "Have you satisfied yourself at last, cruel woman?" he roared, and the glassware still sitting on the dining room table shook. "Here is Erik! Look upon him."

Sprawled on the floor, I slowly opened my eyes. The room rocked alarmingly. He straddled me, gripped my face and forced me to look. As my eyes focused, he came ever closer, until his face loomed right above me. Hot fast breath blew through his collapsed and distorted, discolored and dark, scabby and shredded nose. It was worse than the rest of his skin, which was bad enough. In the shadow it appeared that he possessed a cavernous hole in the center of his face. The skin stretched tightly over his bones, more prominent and developed than facial bones should be, with skin the pasty greenish-white of dough that has been left in the cupboard too long and has gone to mold. That same mottled scaly patchiness continued down the neck under his silk scarf.

Sick and terrified, I glanced only briefly at his mouth as he screamed "I may be a dog, a dog that deserves death, but you, Christine, are a lying bitch, the mother of all foul and faithless bitches in Paris." How could a man scream with no lips? Oh, there was skin, or else how could he have cursed me with such perfect enunciation, the consonants crisp as spring lettuce, sharp as knifeblades?

"Do you like your handsome dog, you scheming trull? The cheapest whore who lifts her skirt and bends over in the back alley is kinder than you." His mouth came straight down to the teeth with no fleshy part, no soft pink padding to form a kiss or twist with emotion. Skin stretched tightly across it, outlining his large square teeth and sharp, thick canines. Under his eyes, deep blue-black circles hung in pouches, and the skin of his brow, while less scabrous than the rest, furrowed up in ridges as he continued to shout.

"Stop," I cried out. "I can't bear it. Please, please stop," and I turned my face away.

He gave a half-growl, half-snarl, "Look at Erik! Here is the answer to all your questions, your damnable, endless questions. Do you like the answer?" and then he grabbed my hair, forcing his face into my view.

Sobbing, still trying to turn my face away without tearing my hair off at the scalp, I must have cried out for mercy, for he laughed fierce and hard, like the piano notes of thunder he had just recreated. "Mercy? Mercy is what God uses to wipe his ass! He's shown none to me, so why should you expect any?"

"He will strike you down for saying that," I sobbed.

A few long locks of shiny black hair fell into my face. It was just as well he had worn the wig when he first showed himself to me, because those four or five curls that sprung at odd intervals from his head would have alone been enough to frighten me. Those locks were a tragic mockery of all that might have been.

I tried to bring my hands up to his face, thinking to claw those black eyes out with my nails. Once, a ballet girl had described a trick. "Slide your finger into the inside corner of the eye as far as it will go," she said. "Dig in with your nail, and then pull out, hard." So I slid my hands up towards his face, but he was ready for me.

He clasped my wrists like steel cuffs and shouted, "So you think to scratch me, harpy? Perhaps you think I still play, and that this mockery of a face really isn't mine? Do you think this is a nursery game? You're so fond of them, you and your little blond friend in the sailor suit! Let's see if it's a game after all. Let's see if we can remove Erik's mask, and discover if there's really a beautiful prince hidden underneath."

I must have shown shock, because he looked at me sharply. "You did think that, didn't you? You thought I was handsome. I saw you watching me as we sang Act Three. Is there a surprise for little Christine under this face that God crapped out one day? Let's investigate." My hands had no will of their own, for had I resisted, he would have snapped my wrists like chicken bones. I tried to ball my hands into fists, but he found some nerve in my palm and pressed until the pain forced me to open them. Again and again he forced me to dig into his waxy cold brow and cheeks, until the blood filled my nails and dripped onto my face, onto the front of that beautiful grey dress.

Then, as if the strings had been cut on a shadow-play puppet, he sank with his full weight onto my body, his face pressed into my shoulder. Wetness soaked through the thin fabric, tears or blood, I could not tell. Never had the full weight of a man rested on me before. A mountain of iron pressed down upon me, and I struggled to breathe.

He held me down at the shoulders, pinning my arms with his lower body. In an entirely different voice he began to chant, "Why? Why, Christine? We could have been happy. You could have gone back upstairs, up to the opera, and come back to see me once in a while. We would have sung together, and continued our lessons. But now, look what you have done with your damnable curiosity. Why did you have to see my face? Why were you not content? Don't you know that if a woman sees my face, she never sees the light of day again? She remains with me forever," and he laughed and sobbed all at once, tears washing the clotted blood from his smeared cheeks.

"Where are those other women? Where are they now?" I cried out, for there clearly were no others here, and that could mean only one thing.

Instead of answering, he rocked his body back and forth, crooning, "Why must they want to see if Erik is handsome? Why?"

"What are you going to do with me?" For I felt that if he continued to talk to me, he would not kill me, at least not right away.

"If Erik lets you loose, will you struggle?" he whispered. "Does Erik have to bind and gag you?"

No, I shook my head rapidly, no.

He lowered himself off of me, not touching me anymore. I rolled over away from him as quickly as I could, thinking to grab the fire-iron not two meters from my reach and open his skull with it. My ill-chosen attempt bought me nothing. Again seizing my hair with vehement fury, he dragged me across the drawing room floor, and this time I shrieked with the pain, for my skirt caught on the leg of the pedestal table and held me there, while he continued to tug. He yanked me free and towards the door of his bedroom he pulled me.

"To your feet," he growled, and I glanced once again the inside of that blackened, reddened cave. He yanked me up and slammed me up against the doorframe. I swayed, about to fall to the floor, and wondered why he hadn't simply carried me into his room and thrown me on that sepulchural bed, the bed I had not five minutes earlier seen in my mind's eye as the conclusion of our duet.

His face was terrible to behold, twisted not only with deformity but rage as well. He stuck one hand deep in the pit of my stomach, right below the breast, in that spot where if you are hit you gasp for breath like a beached fish, and he pressed inwards ever so gently. I stood paralysed, for the slightest movement in any direction would cause my breathing to stop.

"So you wanted to know the story of my opera? Let me tell you the secret of why no woman who sees my face can ever leave me. Don Giovanni had his thousands, two thousand sixty five to be exact, as he wanted none of them more than three days. Yet all those women combined could not hold him back when the pit of hell itself yawned under him. But my Don Juan, he's a handsome fellow like me."

I winced, and those black-gold eyes noticed everything. "You don't think I'm handsome?" he roared. "My love, unlike Don Giovanni's, does not fail. I have no need of a harem, of thousands, of the endless multiplication of female flesh like tadpoles in a stream. Can you imagine any more horrific nakedness than my face? Good, you nod, at least you are honest with me, for this moment anyway.

"The nakedness of my face is like a fire from heaven," he said, stabbing once or twice into my diaphragm just a little, so that I gasped, breathless. "Surely you remember the mother of Bacchus? She too wanted to see, she too burned with curiosity and made Zeus promise her anything she wanted, and what she wanted more than anything was to see him in his glory. He needed not strike her with a thunderbolt, as the glory of his presence alone was enough to reduce her to ash, and within his thigh he sewed up the child that she carried.

"It's like that with my Don Juan. He needs no harem. The woman he loves is his harem of one, and he will not burn her when she sees him in his glory, for what he is. That is his triumph – fire from heaven will not burn him, and he in turn will not burn to ash the one he loves."

He released his hand from my stomach while his words became madder, less coherent. I dared not move, for fear of that breath-robbing stab in the diaphragm once more.

"Do you see that coffin in there, Christine?" pointing and stabbing towards his bed. "I'm going to enlarge it, so that you fit in it with me. It's simple. You will stay with me, here in these rooms. This will be your home. If you live here, quietly, you may have anything you want – dresses,books, music. I will entertain you, and you will find me an amiable companion. When I set my mind to it, I have never failed to make a woman laugh. I will honor your virtue, so long as you remain virtuous. But you will never leave, and if you try to escape, I will kill you.

"You will die here, Christine, because it is a corpse you now have for a lover, a corpse who loves you, and at the end of our love, we will both lie down in this coffin together, and the earth shall fall down upon us. I am a walking dead man, and so are you, a woman who is dead, although her body has not yet caught up with her. But because you are beautiful, you don't know it yet. Oh, you will feel it someday, when your fresh pink cheeks fade and wrinkle, when your hair comes out by the handful and your eyes grow dim. But think how lucky I am, because I have always had that knowledge.

"I've always been a living corpse from top to bottom, and not just my face. For I think once the mask has been removed, the woman should have every curiosity fulfilled, even the questions she doesn't yet know to ask. You're lucky, Christine. If you're careful, you may have that knowledge dripped out slowly upon you, with time, instead of wrapped around your neck in an instant. Erik should hate that, because he loves you, and doesn't want to let you go, doesn't want to let you go the route of all the other insatiable women who spawn such plagues on the world.

"So shall we explore the mysteries together? Shall we investigate what you have let loose? Surely you have more questions."

My head rang with terror, with sickness. There was no fight left in me. As I slumped, he lowered me to the floor and sat down near me, long legs drawn up, spiderlike.

"Has it ... always been like that?" I whispered.

Any other man's expression could be described as dreamy, but in his case, it was one out of a nightmare. His eyes took on a faraway look. "The insatiable desire to know is written by nature into every woman, because every woman longs to see her child. I know that it's simply the weak and stupid nature of women, but Erik doesn't understand. Now to answer you ... The tale was told that when I appeared, my mother started screaming and wouldn't stop, not till they poured syrup of laudanum down her throat. 'It might hurt the baby when it comes out in the milk,' someone said, and another replied, 'That would be a mercy.' See, there's that mercy of God again, for what it's worth. But the laudanum shut her up and didn't kill me. Then my father wanted to see me, but when the midwife told him what I looked like, he waved me away. 'I don't want to see it,' he said. 'Maybe it won't live.'

"I disappointed him, too, and he ordered my mother to nurse me and dandle me out of his sight. I was never to appear in his presence without a mask, or he would beat her, seeing as when any monster is birthed, it's the fault of the dam and not the sire, as that ignorant old man thought.

"So what makes you think, Christine, that you could see me any time you liked, when even my parents barely saw my face?"

We both sat shaking on the floor, all the fight gone out of us. I said nothing, and then, most horrible of all in that dreadful evening, he began to cry. A man's tears are not like a woman's. Those who find a man's tears effeminate are wrong, for a man does not weep unless something tears out his very heart from its roots. Erik lay face down on the Turkey carpet with its red and blue whorls so good for hiding bloodstains. He sobbed and beat the flat of his hand on the carpet, each sob punctuated with a blow. I don't know how long I sat through that bout of weeping. I could have walked away and he would not have noticed, but my arms and legs shook so hard that I could not stand.

Then I began to weep a little myself as I realized that had I actually brained him with the poker as I'd planned, I would have died of slow starvation down in that rocky tomb. The front door to his apartments remained as imperviously closed as that of any fortress, as barricaded as that other hidden door in the Louis-Phillipe bedroom. I would leave this apartment when Erik gave me leave, and no sooner.

After a long struggle, the mind goes strangely still. Erik continued to sob, but more quietly now. Then, dreadfully, instead of rising to his feet like a man, he pulled himself along with his elbows, sliding on his belly like a serpent or some kind of reptile. Each pull pushed a breathy little sob out of him, and he would not look at me. His vest-front buttons scraped on the carpet. Finally he crawled into his room, and without looking back, shut the door quietly.

The apartment was silent. His discarded mask lay on the rug, and absently I picked it up and jammed it into my pocket. Next to it was one of his brass vest buttons, and I took that too.

I had no reason to doubt him, that I would stay here until I died or until he decided to let me go, whichever came first. For the first time since I had woken in this prison, the thought of suicide seriously crossed my mind. Not as a ploy to get Erik to let me go, not as a pretext to slice him with scissors, but as a serious means of escape, for none other seemed open to me.

For it was not him so much I feared, as what would happen to me were he himself to die, or fail to return. It was the fear of dying a captive animal, pounding against the walls of one's tomb, like the poor Fortunato I read about as a schoolgirl, walled up inside the wine cellar's rocky tomb. God would have to understand that Erik had driven me mad with terror, and then I laughed like a madwoman, because would a madwoman know that terror had driven her mad? Was there no recourse, no mercy from God were I to kill myself?

Half laughing, half sobbing like Erik, I tried to stand up, but could not. I crawled on hands and knees to my own room, and that was the first time I called it "mine." It's yours now, I thought, yours forever. He said he would keep me, that he would never let me go, and this is where I shall live, at least until he slips on a stone, or decides he's tired of me and never comes back. Lying on the floor besides the mahogany bed, looking at the gleaming silver tip of the scissors that rested on the vanity table, I closed my eyes, and wondered if it were possible to hide from the terrible mercy of God.

(_continued_)


	10. Harem of One

**Harem of One**

**A/N:**_ The first year of the new millenium is 1901, not 1900. Raoul's last Twelfth Night is in 1913._

In the twelfth decade of the new millenium, on the Twelfth Night of his last Yuletide on this earth, Raoul brought home a Victor Talking Machine. When we returned from hearing the Holy Mass of the Epiphany, he and Jannecke busied themselves in the closed-off drawing room. The grandchildren danced around impatiently, demanding to know what Grandpapaand their father were doing. Martine and I quieted them marzipan and cookies. Then Raoul ceremoniously opened the wide sliding doors, and the children were finally allowed in.

There it sat on the side table. Its squat horn and bulky wooden box of a body attracted the grandchildren, who clustered around it but dared not touch the glossy surface. Then, smiling and giving a wink to Jannecke, Raoul placed a black disc on the platter, turned the crank, and set the needle onto the whirling circle.

I stood transfixed, for from the ungainly horn came the purest tenor, a molten cascade of sound. That soaring tone was joined by a soprano, poured out like cream. Raoul and I had heard the incomparable Enrico Caruso in Milan, and here he was, bodiless as a ghost, yet singing in our drawing room with the American soprano Nellie Melba.

Mathilde, Martine's youngest, began to cry. She kept looking for the source of the sound, for some person behind the invisible voice, but finding nothing, retreated in tears to the safety of her mother's arms.

"Where's the man?" her older sister Lilli asked. Coaxing her sister from her mother's lap, Lilli lured Martine around the room to look for "the man's voice." When none was to be found, Lilli came up to me and asked, "Grandmama, is it an angel? Mama says the angels speak to us, so is this one?"

I gave Martine a hard look, and she jerked her head back, indignant. Gathering the little ones on either side of me on the divan, I said, "When the angels speak to us, little ones, they touch us directly on the heart, not on the ears. When we hear something with our ears, it's because of sound. The needle scrapes over the disk, and makes a sound. That sound gets made bigger by the horn, so we can hear it. That's where the sound comes from, that black disc."

"Is the man in the disc?" Mathilde asked solemnly. Across the room, Raoul laughed and it was his turn to repel arrows from Martine's sharp blue eyes.

"Of course the angels speak to us," she said abruptly. "Mother, I don't know why you would tell them that."

Raoul watched me from across the room with an intent gaze. "Well, in any event, there's no angel in that talking machine over there," he finally said, firmly.

"So how does the sound get in there?" Lilli wanted to know. She ran over to Raoul and reached around his leg. "How does sound come out of a round black circle? Grandpapa, how do you know it's not an angel?"

I looked helplessly at Raoul, who smiled back at me with his eyes as he picked Lilli up in his arms. He had grown broad in his later years, and Lilli rested comfortably on his stout stomach. "Lilli darling," he said, "I know the machine sounds like magic. Sometimes when you are young, it is hard to tell the difference between something enchanted and something that comes from nature."

"So how do you tell, Grandpapa?"

"Sometimes it is difficult. Sometimes you have to ask someone that you trust. That is why you have a Papa and a Mama, and your grandmother and I."

"Mama thinks there are angels that speak to us," Lilli objected. "But Grandmama doesn't."

Raoul laughed and bent down to bring Mathilde up into his arms as well. He spun them around and said, "But Madame Melba sings like an angel, doesn't she? Your grandmama used to sound like that, too."

He tried to set them down, but they clamored, "Spin us again!" A little red-faced, he took them around a few more times under Martine's disapproving eye, while Jannecke busied himself with the next selection from a box of black discs which had come with the talking machine. Panting, Raoul sat down next to me, and I clasped his hand.

That night he took me with unexpected energy and I clung to him like a starving woman, astonished at my own hunger and sorrow. Outside the bedcurtains the air was chill, but under the covers we explored a tropical country, yielding and expansive and warm. I drifted away into darkness, still quivering. Usually it was he who slipped into sleep first, but that night he lay awake, shifting against me. His movements disturbed me and I asked him what was wrong.

"I want to thank you," he said softly.

"For what?" I said, half in dream. "I should have thanked you for bringing the Victrola."

"No, it's not about that. I mean for all this. For everything." He pulled me to him, suddenly intense. "I saw your face tonight, when the girls started prattling. Christine, let it go. It's been three decades. You're not protecting me anymore, because I'm not that boy stabbed with jealousy. You're not that girl led around by illusions."

"You never speak about it. This is the first time, since ..." I had to think hard. "Since we were first married."

"I thought it would hurt you to stir things up. I didn't know if I should. But tonight when you looked so forlorn, when the silly and innocent belief of a child could remind you so much of your own gullibility, something had to be said."

"The memory still oppresses me," I said, pulling my body up to his as close as could be. "I go for months, not thinking of it, and then something happens to remind me. I hide it inside, because it seems so horrible to bring into the light of day, into our lives. It's as if I'm still not free."

"Well, you are," he said, half-resting his weight on me, eyes closing.

"Because of you," I whispered.

"Because of yourself. You did what you could. You did what you had to. Besides, you aren't the only one with something on your conscience. I have a weight on mine, too."

"What do you mean?" I asked, sitting up a little, alarmed. I had seen women in shops, in the theaters, look at my glossy husband and then look pityingly, condescendingly at me, the little mouse, the old wife.

He settled down into his pillow. "I've confessed it," he said, "but still it hangs there on my soul, like the pains a man has in a limb that has been long sawn off. Don't look so worried, Christine."

"Should I be?" For I was. God, I prayed, not that. You spared me so far, I can't imagine why. Practically every woman I know has a husband who keeps another woman. Please, not that.

He laughed a little and kissed me so that his moustache, no longer silky, no longer blond, rubbed up against my cheek.

"That tickles," I murmured, anxious.

"It's meant to."

"So on with your confession."

I could feel his warm, comfortable body tense a little.

"No, Christine, I'm serious. I think I shot a man once. I never saw his face, only saw the blood on the lintel and sill of my window in my brother Philippe's old townhouse."

"What? You never told me this," I slowly said, suddenly sick. A rising vertigo claimed me. Thank God it wasn't a mistress, but what did this now mean? The room began to spin, even though I was lying down. "When did it happen?"

"It was long ago, the night before ... your performance as Marguerite, the night before your capture. We had talked on the roof of the Opera, do you remember, when I told you I would take you away? We did more than talk, as I remember. I came home in a terrible mood, determined that you would go with me the next night, stricken that you hadn't left with me then and there."

"I'm sorry," I whispered. "How often do I have to say it?"

"No recriminations," he said seriously. "I tell you just to let you know how it went. Philippe was home, which was unusual, and he had just opened a bottle of wine, some kind of sweet dessert wine that tasted like syrup. He saw my mood and kept filling my glass, thinking it would calm me down. Instead, it inflamed me, and we quarrelled. No, quarrelled isn't the word. He shouted, and I yelled back at him in rage." He shook a little, and I knew then he fought back tears. Philippe, so loved, so mourned.

"Philippe slammed the door to his study shut. I could hear the servants running through the hall, no doubt all clustering outside the door to listen. I slapped him with my glove, my own brother, and he stood up, his eyes terrifying. It occurred to me that if he took up my challenge he would certainly kill me, because he was a far better shot than I, deadly at fencing, and probably almost twice my weight. Then he started to laugh and called me an insolent young pup, one who hadn't thrown him the gauntlet like a man, but instead was simply a little dog who brought his master his own glove and laid it at his feet. That was the kind of challenge I presented, he said, and I would get a fitting response.

"Furious, I told him I was going to marry you the very next night.

" 'Idiot,' he replied. 'You can't get married like that in France. That's in romantic novels read by shopgirls. The Republicans have put the pay to clandestine marriages.'

" 'Then I shall go to Belgium,' I answered. 'At least that is still a Catholic country. Not that you care.'

" 'You will go nowhere,' he said quietly and coldly between clenched teeth, 'except to bed. We will talk in the morning.'

"I continued to rail at him, but he brushed me off, calling for his manservant to help take me upstairs. Philippe took one arm, Julian the other, and between the two of them lifted my feet nearly from the floor.'

"In the corridor the butler interrupted. 'A gentleman here to see you at this late hour, Monsieur le Comte,' he said, anxious and disturbed.

" 'Who is he? Tell him to be off, to come back at a civil hour.'

" 'I didn't recognize him, your honor, as his face was heavily bundled against the cold. He insisted on seeing you. He said it was about the unfortunate business at hand, and that you would know what he meant.'

" 'Well, let's get this whelp to bed first,' Philippe said, gesturing towards me. 'Tell this late visitor that I will see him in the blue salon.' You never saw it, Christine, as I couldn't take you there, but it was all done in deep blue silk damask ... oh, I am sorry."

I rested my head on his chest, listening to his strong, steady heart. Philippe would not have a light woman from the opera in his family's Paris townhouse. There were apartments for that sort of thing. "It's all right. It was long ago. By the way, who was it that came to visit?"

"I never found out," he went on. "I've wondered about that, and for awhile in Paris even tried to find out, when we were ... waiting. Before we were engaged. But the servants had all been dismissed, and the house shut up. The servants I could find mostly wouldn't talk to me, and the one who would wasn't that helpful. All he said was that a tall man had come to call, one with a wide black hat, and a black woolen scarf covering his face for the cold. But apparently Philippe had taken too long to put me to bed, for when he returned to the blue salon, the stranger was gone. 'He was no gentleman,' the cook's assistant said. 'He was in a hired carriage, he was.'

"Yes, servants can tell things like that," I mused, not liking the path on which my thoughts took me.

"Servants know more about class than anyone," Raoul said. "The fire roused by the wine had since died down, and Philippe knew exactly what he did, for all I wanted was sleep. They must have undressed me, although I don't remember it. I do remember pulling off my nightshirt, even though it was the dead of winter, like now. Had I been my own father, I'd have thrashed me for risking pneumonia like that."

"You have never thrashed a child in your life. Besides, you have me to keep you warm."

"True," he chuckled, "although I think that works the other way around. Heated with wine, I kicked off the covers, for they lay all about the floor. Some scraping noise woke me, a slide of furniture or a window in its frame, I don't know what. The sense of being watched was very strong, oppressive. Then there were the eyes, yellow-gold like a cat's, and the sound of breath. I leapt from the bed and almost fell over, because my head still reeling from drinking. I cried out, upon which those glowing lamps winked out. The lamp must have been out of oil, for it wouldn't light when I turned the key, and I cursed the servant who let that happen.

"Naked, I crept out of bed, sliding along the wall, feeling for the bureau dresser, dangling in the breeze and bumping into furniture. In the top drawer I found my revolver. Then I saw those eyes again, at the window. I fired. Glass went everywhere, the servants came running, and there was the blood. A cat, Philippe said," and Raoul laughed bitterly. "Perhaps it was. My head was still spinning with wine. I don't know what I shot. My mind said a cat, but my senses said a man, a prowler who entered my room and stalked me like prey as I slept, who took or disturbed nothing."

I lay back in the darkness, Raoul's full warm body stretched out half-on mine, and I said nothing. It was no cat, of that I was sure, sure with the certainty of the grave. But let the dead bury their dead. "I think it was a cat," I said. "A burglar would have taken your cufflinks, your wallet, your coat. You were angry, you'd had too much to drink, and under those circumstances, even the most ordinary things look threatening." Then I kissed him, and whispered, "You're welcome."

"You're welcome?" he repeated, confused.

"Didn't you thank me 'for everything?' a few moments ago? Well, you're welcome. For everything."

On my breast he rested. Slow breathing told me he was gone into his own depths, leaving me to think of a prowler on the balcony, a gunshot, and a festering wound that never healed.

Two months later Raoul was dead.

Now the talking machine sits covered by a thin white cloth. Jannecke promises to come and fetch it, as well as the box of platters that Raoul brought with it. I have no desire to listen to opera singers. I sing, but only alone, trying to recreate long wordless laments I heard underground so long ago.

The mirrors are still covered as well, and I have worn nothing but deep black for all these months. Martine tells me that it is old-fashioned, that only old women wear black in the year after the death of their husbands. She says that it's simply barbaric, to wear widow's weeds the rest of your life, as some do. I smile at her and say, I am an old woman. No, she protests, because if you are, then I am on my way.

It's not because I'm an old woman that I wear deep mourning, that the mirrors are covered, and Raoul's photographs put away. It is because through his death I have to die as well. The woman I was is no more. You would think that casting aside the woman that was, putting on the woman yet to be, should not be difficult. After all, I've already done it several times. There was the night when I discovered Erik's terrible secret, the death of the innocence of mind. There was the shredding of my virginity, and the death of the body's innocence. There was the opening of my womb, and the death of the girl in the birth of my first little boy.

Each of those deaths resulted in the birth of something new. When I saw Erik's face, I decided to live. In me grew the conviction, not of Raoul's and my shared faith, but of my own deep personal experience, carved into my own flesh as it were, that I would live. Not only did I decide to keep my body alive. It was as if I found once again my mind, after all those years of dark superstitious obscurity.

Over those nights of becoming a woman, that was the birth of the life of the flesh, that awakening that Erik would never directly taste himself.

The mother births her child in the midst of death. As soon as I could walk, I came to the church door leaning on Raoul's arm, the baby nurse carrying a heavy white bundle of blankets with Philippe nestled in the middle. The priest sprinkled me with holy water, and led me into the nave, where kneeling before the altar he blessed me, and Philippe and Raoul as well. Still faint and weak from the birth, I swayed and Raoul noticed. He came to kneel beside me at the rail of the high altar, propping me up with his shoulder. The priest shook the hyssop once again, sprinkling us with soft sweet-smelling rain, and while I had known myself a mother before, with the first sound of Philippe's cry, all through me it felt fierce and certain and final, that the girl was dead, and the mother was born in blood and pain along with the son.

And Erik's death itself, oh, I cannot write it yet. It will come, with the dying glory of autumn when I go back to Perros-Guirec. It's a seaside resort now, but in October the bathers all go back to Paris and London, leaving the hotels and rock-strewn beaches silent except for the clamoring waves. Go there I shall, for I have not been since that icy winter when Erik played my father's tune for me, over my father's bones. I want to see again that churchyard full of skulls where Erik the _Ankou_, the Brittany demigod of death, terrified Raoul. I will sit on that rose-red coast where the giants have tumbled stones for their game of bowls, and write his passing. What has been birthed of that death I do not know.

Now comes the latest death, the death of the wife. I already knew the silence that shrouds a house when children are grown and gone, but there was still Raoul rustling newspapers in the morning, lingering over coffee, long evenings of conversation before the fire, letters to read to each other, letters to write, the garden to dig. There were grandchildren to tuck into the narrow nursery cots when they came to stay, and Grandpapa telling them the story of The Wild Swans. For he would not read it to them, as I did, but told it, draping his arms out like dispirited wings, or huddling them close to his body as the girl and her brothers clung together on the rocky island in the middle of the sea, or clutching one arm with the other as one brother lived with his feathery wing the rest of his life. I was the actress in one of those former lives of mine, yet Raoul brought the story to life with his body.

There was night after the fire was banked, after the house was darkened, the drapes and bedcurtains drawn, and the explorations of that tropical country begun, sometimes with the long hot thrust of love and sometimes simply with hands and voices and hushed conversation. I rarely sleep in our bed since he died. Instead I sleep in the nursery, in the iron cot used by our night nurses, long ago. Mathilde and Lilli will come to stay when Jannecke takes the Victrola, and they will marvel that Grandmama will sleep in the nursery with them. But that big curtained bed is so hard to bear. Even in summer that room is cold, no matter how high the fire.

I wish I could see the creature dragging its feet towards birth when the wife I was finally gives up the ghost. I know that woman in me still lives, that she has not surrendered yet, for I as yet do not know what I will become. When you know your fate, you know you have truly died. It is the end of questioning, the end of expectation, the end of anxious waiting.

How many times will I die before I die? And what will I become?

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

The unmasked Erik, more naked without his mask than a man without clothes, had softly closed his door, filling the rooms with silence. Slowly I pulled myself from the carpeted floor of my bedroom, trying hard not to look at the sharp little points of the scissors on the vanity. Instead I stared at the faded rose Aubusson rug, so luxurious, yet so trite. If I'm going to do it, it should be now. It seems a shame to get blood on this rug, but it deserves it. Seventy years ago someone thought this would be a fine rug for a girl on the verge of womanhood. It represented hopes – a good marriage, suitors from the ranks of the petty bourgeois. Or perhaps it was a present from a young husband, anxious to show that his pretty wife, despite her humble origins, was entitled to good things.

From the writing desk I pulled out foolscap and pen, and began to write.

It went something like this:

_Dearest Raoul,_

_If you receive this, it will mean that I am dead, and that my captor has shown a rare mercy that might even save his soul from final damnation. For it is only through his good graces alone that you will even see this, and I beg of you to show him consideration, and not blindly strike out for vengeance._

_Pray for my soul, even though by our faith you are not supposed to, for shortly after I finish this letter, I plan to take my own life. I have been kidnapped by this terrifying man of brutal genius, and have uncovered a terrible secret of his, a secret he wishes no one else to know. While he has not ravished my body, he intends to ravish my spirit, and keep me with him a prisoner forever. He has laid at my feet a great love, a love that to him stretches around the world, and now that I have discovered his secret, he says he will never let me go, and I believe him._

_Dear friend, I know that God has prepared the eternal fire for suicides, but I am in despair and see no escape. You remember when we were children and played on the rosy coastline, how I would never follow you when you crawled into caves? This is like a cave, only worse, because I fear being buried alive more than anything. Sweet Raoul, I could sing Aida, but never could I share her fate. I would have done anything to avoid being shut up in the tomb, as she was._

_My head spins, and there's no up or down, everything I learned of right and wrong is gone. We light candles to a saint who let a man kill her rather than let him force her to open her legs (forgive my crudity, but I feel my death very near and can't waste time with pieties.) Was that not a form of suicide? Yet Holy Mother Church has raised Maria Goretti to the altar. This man wants me as his paramour, perhaps even as his wife, but I will not let him pull me down into a grave with him. If I go into a grave, it shall be a grave of my own choosing, in my own time._

_Raoul, please sell my fur, my gold chain and pearl earrings in my carved Bengali box at home, and give the money to Mama Valerius, as I fear she will be cheated if she tries to sell them herself. Give her the opal brooch to remember me by. _

_  
This silver filigree ring is yours, for your own remembrance of me. It belonged to my mother; it's all of her I have. If Philippe should find someone suitable for you, and you become engaged (and I hope it comes sooner than later, because I don't want you to pine for me too long), take my ring to Perros-Guirec and throw it into the sea, so that you will not trouble the heart of the girl you come to love._

_You cannot believe how the prospect of life's end terrifies me. Sweet Christ, sweet friend Raoul, I beg you both to forgive me, for I have failed you both miserably. _

"_Remember me, but forget my fate."_

_Your little Christine._

When I had finished Raoul's letter, I wrote a much shorter one for Erik, roughly as follows, for I do not have those letters. I wish I did, but somehow they have been lost.

_Erik:_

_I cannot live in a tomb, nor can I wait to die slowly in one. Don't confuse me with Aida. _

_If you have a scrap of honor in you, you will deliver this letter and this ring to Monsieur le Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, if only for the sake of my poor Mama Valerius. Send it to the townhouse owned by Raoul's brother, the Comte Philippe de Chagny. I don't know the exact address, but a man of your talents can surely find it._

_I swear by the angels and saints that if you do not do this, I will do all in my power to see that your seat in hell is hotter and even more painful than mine. Think on that, Erik, that I would choose an eternity in flames over life as your prisoner._

_C.D._

I sat for a long while, looking at these letters, while the blood and tears all over my face, my dress, my hands dried and grew stiff. I was becoming accustomed to the funereal silence of these rooms, and no longer listened for clattering hooves or chatter from the streets. Absently I touched my shoulder where a great stain of Erik's blood was, and thought, blood will set in wool if it's not washed out.

My thoughts elsewhere, or nowhere at all, I slowly undid the dress and had it half-off when I said to myself, You are going to kill yourself in a few moments. Why do you care if the dress is soiled? Then I laughed, long and loose like a madwoman. Filling the tub with cold water, I rubbed the dress until all the bloodstains came out. Off came my stained chemise as well, and I continued to wash the garments, naked as the day I emerged from my mother, not caring, because what does a woman about to die care for anything?

I thought the dress would soak up water and be too heavy to handle, but it wrung out beautifully, half-dry already. Not a seam was ripped, not even after that struggle. Who made this, I wondered, not for the first time, and that set off another round of maniacal laughter. What, are you going to engage her as a dressmaker? Perhaps she can sew your shroud.

Throwing one of the thick Turkish towels over myself like a gravecloth, I lay on the bed naked, pretending to be dead. Where shall I do it? I wondered. On the bed, so that this lovely eiderdown is soaked with my blood? In front of Erik, on that beautiful carpet? In a warm bath, like the decadent old Romans? Shivering, I crawled under the down comforter and thought, to kill myself I have to get up. Perhaps I don't have to kill myself right this very instant, I can just close my eyes. Perhaps killing oneself goes better after a nap.

When I woke, it was with that terrible distortion that comes from having no idea of the time, no knowledge of whether it was morning or evening, or how long had passed. My dress and underclothes were only a little damp, and a flush of pride touched me as I saw how well I'd gotten out the blood, as there wasn't a trace of it left. I dressed nervously, wondering why Erik was so quiet, where he was. Perhaps he had decided to wall me in after all, and my stomach clenched.

He had cleaned up the drawing room. The sheet music from the broken piano bench had been stacked neatly on one of the sideboards, and the bench itself sat on the pedestal table, glued and held together with clamps. If any blood stained the carpet, it was invisible in the swirling maroon and dark blue patterns. The apartment was utterly still.

Then from his room came a creak, some rushing air like a bellows being pumped, of a large amount of air compressed into some space, a few soft knocks, and I knew at once what I heard. He was pulling out the organ stops, preparing to play. A moment later, as if the earth had opened and Hades himself had burst forth in his black chariot, one chord crashed through his closed bedchamber door, then another. As the organ rested against the wall shared by the drawing room and his bedroom, the drawing room acted as a gigantic sounding board, filling with the sound and amplifying it. It was as if I sat in the lap of music itself.

I wish I could say that those chords were beautiful. Truth be told, they were not. Sevenths, ninths, elevenths multiplied up and down the scales. Their harsh ugliness rang with deep passion, however, to make Otello and Desdemona's struggle sound weak and contrived. These chords told of naked feeling, black and bleeding and broken. He did not sing, and I could not imagine what melody would match those progressions that sounded so chaotic, but were actually masterpieces of exquisite structure.

He is an architect of music, I thought. Some men build with stone, as he has, but he carves the stone of sound and forms from it a great cathedral. But not some filigree Notre Dame or fat-cherubed baroque confection. This is a cathdral in hell, black and soaring, radiating with dark light, built of rough-hewn blocks of dark granite glittering with lacerating flakes of mica.

Then came a lyric passage, meltingly sweet, that brought a lump to my throat. It's the woman's theme, it must be. She's a desert woman, I can see her gauze veil sewn with little gold bangles, and she sways on a camel. How can he make an organ sound like an orchestra?

Without words, the story unfolded itself in the ringing walls that surrounded me. One night under a moon white and heavy as a pregnant woman's belly, he stole up to her chamber and kissed her on the balcony. They saw, and hid her away. He broke into the palace, stole her, killed her father when he tried to prevent the escape. Every other woman whom he had loved had died, but not this one, he wasn't going to let her die. But her jealous father wouldn't stay dead. While they thought they had found some happiness on the other side of the desert, the father's spirit entered a great stone statue like those of the Egyptians. It stalked across the dunes looking for Erik's Don Juan and his stolen bride.

Hours he played on, and in that cathedral of sound I listened and absorbed, letting the images play on the back of my lids like puppets, but with life and dimension. There was a final confrontation, where the great dead weight of the father and all his past confronted the defiant man. Who would prevail? Don Juan's theme swelled up again, deliberately composed to clash viciously and fiercely with the father-statue, until at Don Juan's feet the statue lay, collapsed into dust, the mute dead weight of tradition's centuries fallen before the hero.

Then the desert woman's theme rose up sweet (it would be an oboe solo, it would have to be), and with it rose the red sun over the Egyptian sands, the great birth cry of a new god, born triumphant with his queen at his side, who had looked upon the face of fate, of predestination, of convention, destroyed them all, and yet lived. Don Juan's theme and the desert woman's blended, merged into something new, a new creation of one where there had been two, one new being that moved under the silk of the tent canopy, until the final veil came down to conceal the mystery within. The curtain fell.

I knocked on Erik's door. In a dry, strangled voice he said, "Come in." He stood at the bench but didn't turn around. His whole body shook.

"I have never heard anything like that. You have managed to tell a whole story, a huge story of sorrow and passion, without beauty, without prettiness."

"Without sentimentality," he said, softly.

"That's right. It's brutal, but I understood it."

He let out a long sigh, as if he had held his breath. "You will forgive me if I don't turn around. My mask is gone, and while I have others, that one irritates the least."

I reached in my pocket and touched the mask, a little wet from having gone through the wash, but didn't give it to him. "It doesn't matter," I replied. "It's all right, you can turn around." Inwardly I braced myself for the sight, telling myself, I will not flinch, I will not wince, if I do he'll see it, and all will be lost.

He came toward me, his eyes in the red shadows looking like two coins of brightness floating in sockets filled with blood. He can't help it, I repeated silently, he can't help how he looks, don't look away, don't close your eyes. He put his face very closely into mine, testing me, and he looked far worse in the gloom than in the bright-lit drawing room, with his deepset eyes and collapsed nose, that looked almost as if it were not there in the black. His face was covered with long red weals, some ragged and deep, where he'd forced me to scratch him.

For his face to be on the same level with mine, he leaned down with his hands resting on his knees, and he crouched there for some time, just waiting, and then I noticed he was shaking like a dog left out in the rain, his teeth clicking in staccato.

"It is a splendid opera," I whispered. "There's none like it on the earth," and I wasn't flattering him to soften him up, to better beg for freedom.

"It's not finished," he said.

"What do you mean? It sounded finished to me."

"But the last act, where Don Juan fights the statue and wins. That wasn't written down. It has to be scored for the orchestra as well." He spoke just like a child, with a child's insistence on the obvious, even if it isn't obvious to anyone else.

"You played that all from memory," I stated, and he nodded solemnly. "But then you'll take it to the grave with you, so perhaps you shouldn't finish it," I said gently.

"Would you like it if Erik finished it?" he said simply, in a tone I'd never heard before. It reminded me of a child wheedling his governess. A little flash of fear went through me, that perhaps our scene had unhinged his mind.

"I would like an end to all this talk of graves," I answered. "Yes, I think you should finish it, and live." Then I flushed, for I remembered the two letters lying out on the writing desk.

"You want Erik to live," he said in the same childish sing-song, "even after last night."

"Yes," I said patiently, more unnerved by his helpless tone than his frightful face. Then I handed him his button, and dropped it into his outstretched hand, where he stared at it for a moment before putting it away. "Did it damage my coloring any?" I asked.

He shook his head and brushed back one of his long black strands. "What?"

"Your opera. You said it would burn me, damage me. I don't feel burned. I don't look damaged."

"How would you know?" he asked in a sly voice.

"There's a mirror that you forgot to remove, inside the armoire." He moved as if to retrieve it that instant, and I said quickly, "Please, leave it. I need it to dress."

"Of course," he said, relaxing a bit.

"I understand why you wouldn't want it."

"Do you?" he said sarcastically. "You will be a toothless hag of seventy, and you will never understand it."

A sudden flash of anger went through me. Petulant, wilful, childish, those words came to my lips and I held them in. You've decided to live, so live. "As you can see," I started afresh, "your music has moved me beyond words. I want to work with you on it, and sing it with you. It hasn't harmed me, just as the sight of your face hasn't harmed me."

He gazed at me full of hope, but said nothing. I went on, "What you taught me in my dressing room were the nursery scribblings of a child. What you've produced here is the unmeasured passion of the adult. If I shake before you, Erik, it's not with terror. It's because of what you have produced, and that I can look upon it, and you."

"Pretty words," he said finally, "from one whose eyes still dart towards the door."

I flew up, and started to walk towards the drawing room, headed for the fireplace. He leapt up to stop me, and I whirled on him, "Where would I go? You can bind me, or you can let me walk freely around your rooms. I know I can't get out." He followed me closely, ready to restrain me again if necessary. From my pocket I pulled the silk mask, and quickly threw it into the fire, where it spurted up in a snapping, snarling display of sparks, and then was gone.

"That's it," I said. "No more masks between us."

He gave a cry and moved towards the fire, making as if to thrust in his hands and pull it out, but it was already gone, the flames changing back from blue to yellow. Then, slowly, like a mountain that had fallen into the sea, he crawled over to me, picked up my skirt, and hid his face in it.

"You can't," he said, muffled. "You can't look on me. No one can look at me full, in the face."

"I can."

"How?" he whispered.

"I won't pretend, Erik. You are the ugliest man I have ever seen in my life. But you have eyes that see, a mouth that speaks, ears that hear. You have a voice that comes from heaven itself."

"None of that means anything, if you won't love me."

I sighed. "Don't speak of that. You promised."

He sniffed the hem of my dress, running his face around it as if memorizing the scent. "Erik is sorry, but it's so hard not to. I won't mention it again, I promise. Only let me make you happy. I will make you the happiest of women," he said in between the kisses he placed on the cloth.

"Then to make me truly happy," I said, and he jumped up, ready to act, "don't starve me to death."

He practically flew into the kitchen. But he never apologized for buffeting me about like a rag doll. I think he saw nothing wrong in it. I was his, I had defied him. Just as you slap a puppy to make it behave, or rub its nose in its own mess, he had shown his mastery of me.

From then on we followed no particular rhythm of night or morning. I asked him the time, and he said it was unimportant. What mattered, he said, was that we work together, and that I be happy. He liked it when I made little demands, but some he would not honor, like the request for a time piece, or a newspaper, or my freedom. Those he brushed off, as a parent whose child asks for the moon to be caught on a string, or for a pet unicorn. We treat these requests with the mock-seriousness we show towards children at their work, which is play, but take them not at all seriously ourselves.

I had lost all sense of time, and couldn't tell whether it was night or morning. My watch had stopped again, and he wouldn't rewind it for me, no matter how I pleaded. The Ormulu clock had been allowed to run down as well, and no longer struck the hours and half-hours. For as we had no night or morning, our meals followed whatever pattern Erik wished, sometimes breakfast, sometimes a light supper, sometimes simply fruit and cheese. It was impossible to tell night or day, morning or evening, by what we ate and when.

We sang together, even a few arias from his composition. It was a highly unusual creation. Instead of a complicated, overworked plot with sidelines and distractions, his story was simple and straightforward, like a fairy tale. Rather than moving from scene to scene in organized narrative, it seemed more like a series of episodes loosely linked around the theme of the young man who runs off with the harem girl.

His libretto was remarkably small, just twenty or so pages written in impossible-to-decipher scrawls. Practically every aria contained long wordless cadenzas, and some were marked for the singers to improvise. "I want each performance to differ from the others that came before," he commented. He had me sing the desert woman's part, long breaths or wails or deep sensual moans, singing that came from the soul and bypassed words entirely.

He refused to practice what he called condescendingly "upstairs music," music from the opera repertoire. Instead, he improvised on the piano, weaving long expressive phrases without melody or harmony, like conversation rather than music. Sometimes he played Russian composers with whom I wasn't familiar, like Balakirev or Borodin.

He had an odd-looking oboe called a _rhaita, _which he said came from Morocco . Long phrases flowed from it, and he had me follow them faster, higher, until my head spun and the room seemed full of unseen beings moving through the shadows. But then I coughed and sounded strained, so he proclaimed that I was to rest my voice for a time. He sat at my feet, playing his _rhaita _or his harp, until I sank down into the timeless dream that had become my life so many stories below.

I was used to waiting. I had done so much of it, waiting while other blocks of singers rehearsed their parts; waiting in the green-room to go on-stage; waiting in the long evenings at home when there were no performances and Mama Valerius snored. There was no tedium in this waiting, unless he read poetry to me. Baudelaire revolted me, and once I commanded him never to recite it in my presence.

"Oh, you want something sweet," he mocked. "You have St.-Sulpice taste in poetry as well as music, don't you?" He meant the gilded, pastel-painted holy cards of childlike Virgin Marys, and chubby bright-eyed cherubs dropping lilies around her.

"You're unromantic, Erik," I retorted, and he gave a disgusted half-roar, half-snort.

"You know so little. The sultans and shahs of the East believe that if you won a woman 'with the effort of your own hand, as they put it, she was yours. You were free to do anything with her you pleased, use her as a temporary wife for an hour, make her your concubine, or make her your queen. She didn't need to be seduced with syrupy-sweet poetry. She was the one who had to seduce, to win her captor's favor."

"Is that how you see me," I cried, "as your concubine?"

He turned that ravaged face towards me, white and ripped beyond belief, and said quietly, "I will have nothing less than a queen."

"You call it queendom, but it sounds like slavery."

"What you do upstairs is slavery."

"You want me to be an Oriental woman, hidden behind a screen, behind a veil."

"What do you think the veil is for? Behind the veil is protection, tender care, the deepest regard. Yes, wicked men abuse it, as they do so-called 'Christian marriage.' I have seen wickedness like that in the Shah's court, where women were deposited in the _andarun_, the harem, and then discarded. Men are vile, as you no doubt have seen in the corridors and dressing rooms of the Opera. It's for your own good that I am keeping you, Christine. For I will never neglect you, or abandon you, or give you any reason to doubt my faithfulness."

He lowered his ugly head, showing me his scabby, ragged skull. I bit my lip, and closed my eyes.

Weeks must have passed, if I could tell by my periods of sleep and waking. I didn't even wake on my own accord. He always woke me now, knocking gently on my door, calling softly, "Christine, open your eyes, Christine." Sometimes I woke refreshed, other times I felt as if I'd slept only a few hours. But if I wanted to sleep more, he would insist and then forcefully demand that I get up.

I awoke once and found myself in the monthly way of women. There was nothing there for me to use, and sick with embarassment, I knocked on his bedroom door. He came out in a dark blue silk dressing gown, looking vulnerable and smaller in the shoulders when not in frock coat or tuxedo. He never removed his jacket in my presence, not even while cooking, and he hung behind the door, clutching his dressing gown around his throat. He dressed quickly, and as he was about to leave, I stood between him and the front door. "Let me go with you. I know what I need."

Brushing me off, he told me commandingly to stay in my room, which was his practice when he wished to conceal how he opened his front door. He was gone a long time, or what felt like it in my pain and anxiety. When he returned, he had everything I needed.

"Where did you get these things?" I asked, amazed.

"From my laundress," he answered. When I looked surprised, a laundress? he said, "Do you think I do my own washing in the lake?"

"She thinks you have a mistress, then," I joked, embarrassed that the mundane question of our laundry never occurred to me.

The dough-white skin of his cheeks reddened. "She doesn't ask questions."

"Even when she's washed my shifts?" I asked, wanting to provoke, to see what he would say.

Instead, he walked into the kitchen, where he steeped herbs into fragrant tea. Fearing to be drugged again, I asked what was in it, and he answered, "Two kinds of raspberry leaves, crampbark, chamomile, and valerian." Knowing my thoughts, he said, "It will probably make you sleepy."

He prepared the divan for me by the fire and bade me lie there with tea in hand. For what might have been the next two days he waited upon me hand and foot, as if I were an invalid. When I drank the brew, he came over and sat with me, close but never let his hand graze mine. We did not touch after we grappled that night, which seemed so long in the past.

As the langorous warmth of the tea went through me, he talked to me in soft, low, hypnotic tones. Sometimes I listened, sometimes I didn't, and thought of how pleasant it was to lie there under a thick wool blanket, instead of struggling to rehearsal, always having to wear a black skirt for fear of an embarrassing accident, hating to stay at home "sick" for fear of the teasing and catcalls of the other girls in the theater.

I never washed a rag. I assumed he sent them out to his laundress, and tried not to think of what must have crossed her mind.

As I lay on the divan, a thought sliced through me like a knife. Perhaps I can make a mess of my bed, and give him my sheets. On the sheet I can write a message, in ink, down in a corner perhaps. The laundress will see it and read it, and send for help. My limbs were still heavy and languid from the valerian tea, and I couldn't imagine lifting my head, much less concocting an escape plan. Behind me, I heard him setting the table for a meal.

I looked around that room, with its exotic rug and its beautifully simple furniture. Through the open door of my bedroom, the eiderdown coverlet lay on the bed. Someone had embroidered it with remarkable skill, working ribbons into the shape of roses, and twists of lace into borders. I thought, it's been so long since I've been here, Raoul has probably forgotten about me and gone to sea. It's where he was headed anyway. I discouraged him one too many times. He must be gone. No one in Carlotta's group misses me, and I'm no doubt making some understudy very happy.

Then tears came to my eyes, little self-pitying stings that wanted to know, who cared for me, after my mother was no longer there to braid my hair, when first her legs failed, then her hands, then her sight? Who cared for me, when my Papa and Professor Valerius died within a few months of each other, and Mama Valerius took to her bed in a deep strange mood that had never lifted?

Erik's rough fierce temper seemed long in the past, almost forgotten. He spoke to me gently, followed me everywhere, and watched me ruthlessly for any deviation or suspicion of insincerity. He had performed offices that would have sickened and shamed most men. It felt good to be cared for in this _ukiyo_, this floating world he had created all for me. I leaned back, and slept.

It sounds idyllic. It was not, because underneath, like the drone of a bass just slightly off-key from the rest of the orchestra, hummed all the wrongness, the inconsistencies, the guilt. When I let myself reflect, it became clear that I missed Mama Valerius not at all, and lashed myself over it. Cruel, brutal shirker of duty, I told myself. He's infected you with his cynical sensuality, as he cossets you like a pet monkey on a golden chain. Like the prize possession in his harem of one. And the question still remains unanswered, when do you get to leave? And do you even want to?

Of Raoul I tried not to think at all.

After supper one night, or perhaps morning, he told me he had a treat prepared. We were going out. He had engaged a carriage.

(_continued_)


	11. Immodest Proposal

**Immodest Proposal**

Four little heads rest on the nursery pillows upstairs, the last morning of their visit. For a week this lovely old tomb has glowed as it once did when our own children were little.

Jannecke came last week to take the Victrola away, leaving in exchange two little girls. Mathilde and Lilli jumped up and down excitedly, crowing about having a new music box that made voices. I had telegraphed Anki and Philippe in Grobbendonk, where Anki's mother Mme. Gyselink had been visiting. She kindly conveyed Johannes and Genna down to Brussels on the train. Four year old Larissa had night terrors occasionally, and Anki wanted her nearby. Baby Roland, while walking, still occasionally helped himself to Anki's bountiful breast at night, and so stayed behind as well.

Shortly before Raoul's death I had found in a bookshop a beautifully illustrated French edition of the English fantasy Peter and Wendy. I couldn't decide upon which set of grandchildren to bestow it, so I kept it and read it myself, alternately weeping or laughing. I can read it to the children, I thought. At eight, Johannes and Lilli are the perfect age. Johannes is so quiet, he looks as if he's dreaming half the time, but he takes it all in. He won't mind being the only boy with all these girls, either. Johnannes isn't a child who becomes bored easily. He quietly reads, or writes and draws in his little sketchbooks. He likes to pick out little tunes of his own invention at the piano but shows no special precocity.

The nursery has long windows that go to the floor, and the elm branches and the wide overhanging eaves keep the room cool. Through the thick elms the garden is burned brown with summer neglect. Raoul had always engaged and supervised the gardeners, sometimes digging and planting right alongside them, to their amused surprise. With no one to put nets over the Pandy sour cherry trees, most of the fruit has gone to the birds. Raoul was so full of pride for these trees, as well as his raspberry and blackberry bushes, but now the berries sprout canes everywhere and there are far fewer fruits this summer than before. Under my indifference, the fountain chokes up with algae and the bushes are overgrown.

I pulled toys out of chests and arranged them through the nursery. For Johannes, I placed Philippe's old lead soldiers on one of the small wooden desks. He won't play war with them, instead, he'll line them up and sketch them, or arrange them into geometric patterns. A strange child, that one.

For the little girls, I retrieved a bag of Martine's old rag dolls, with hats and aprons and dresses. She had liked the soft ones that I'd sewn so much more than the china-headed ones. I had stitched and embroidered little aprons for them, even decorating one with a few strips of lace. I should teach Lilli to make lace, I thought, if I have the patience. My attention is so fleeting these days. Raoul liked to watch me make lace in the evenings, and it got so much easier with the coming of the electric light. "You're so still," he would say. "So absorbed. I've never seen anyone sit and work so diligently. It makes me feel peaceful just to look at you."

Genna, there was no need to entertain Genna, but this packet of mischief had to be watched. She would follow me, or the cook, or the nurse everywhere, watching us intently. I expected her to chide me about the garden. When not supervising my household, she would follow Lilli and Johannes everywhere, and held back the tears when they tried to evade her. Mathilde in her turn followed Genna everywhere, so that sometimes they made a little train of children roaming through house or garden.

For Johannes and Lilli were inseparable all through the week, whispering secrets and stories to each other, little fables or adventures which Johannes wrote down in his black-bound book with the thick white paper.

Mme. Gyselink arrived with the children but refused my offer of tea. Her husband needed her in the studio, and she had missed him during those bucolic weeks in Grobbendonk. As she was about to go, she looked at me with concern. "Are you sure it's not too much for you? You're still in mourning, after all, still getting over the shock."

"It's been four months," I said.

"And the heat. If I were in your position, I would think of going to the seashore."

"The children are, after they've visited with me this week," I said patiently. "Both Martine's and Philippe's family are meeting in a _pension_ by the seaside at De Haan."

"And you're not going with them? To miss bathing at De Haan, imagine that."

"I'm happy to stay here right now, and the heat doesn't bother me."

"Have you given any more thought to Philippe's request?" she asked.

I hesitated. A nameless apprehension had been growing inside me over Philippe's upcoming hospital assignment in London. "Mme. Gyselink, do you resent Anki asking me to come stay with her?"

She sniffed a little but maintained her composure. "I can assure you, whatever Anki's desires are, I will not contradict her. My knees have gotten so much worse, I can't bend down for the children easily anymore. I'm not of much use to her."

So that was it. "Of course you are of use to her. A grandmother is more than knees. Listen, this is my thinking. Until you mentioned it, I didn't know why it hung so heavily on me. It's not that I don't want to help Anki while Philippe is absent. It's that I don't want to go to Grobbendonk. I'd like to stay here, in my own home. Let's have Anki and the children come here. You're not far, less than a kilometer away. The children can be in and out of our houses. I'll engage a nurse while they're here, to do the lifting and the bending, and to take them back and forth if need be."

"It's a year now, you know," the glassmaker's wife said ominously.

"A year? But Philippe said six months. Oh, that can't be. Philippe hasn't mentioned it."

"He just received the contract. The offer is for a year, at the London Medical College. Mme. de Chagny, forgive me for frankness, but I don't feel right about this. It's not fitting for a husband and wife to be separated for so long. He says he'll visit, but that's not the same. What can we do?" She laughed. "Listen to us, old interfering mothers-in-law."

"Philippe has always been stubborn. If he thinks it's someone else's idea, he will dig in his heels and balk. Louvel once called him a 'Missouri mule,' for a particularly large and refractory variety found over in the States. There really is only one answer, isn't there?"

She nodded her grizzled head, topped with a cerulean blue hat three seasons out of fashion. A great wave of feeling swept over me for Emelia Gyselink. When Philippe and Anki rushed into marriage, she held her head up and smiled throughout. Her love for their children was fierce, wordless.

"Philippe must take his family to London," she said finally. "It kills me to say that. Anki is our only child, as you know. When she moved to Grobbendonk, I thought my heart would break. But London..."

"We'll visit them together. We can take the train to Antwerp, and then set sail for London," I said in a rush. "But you're absolutely right. They must go, and not because two grandmothers want to get out of any work."

"Philippe and Anki are so close," she sighed. "Can you see them apart?"

"No, it's impossible. But how to make Philippe understand? I'll speak to him when I take Genna and Johannes back home. He must see reason."

"I'll talk to Anki," she said with a twinkling expression. "Once she sees the wisdom, she'll know what to do. She'll convince him."

Our laundress has a daughter of sixteen, Berthe, a stout, reliable girl. She came to stay for the week the children were here. One cool morning we packed apples, a few crusts of bread under the grudging eye of the cook (who complained we were depriving ourselves of excellent bread pudding for dessert), and took the tram to the Parc Woluwe. While the little girls fled swans who chased after them after being teased with a few scraps of bread, Johannes and Lilli walked off under the arching lilacs.

"Shall I follow them?" Berthe asked anxiously.

"There's no need," I reassured her. "They won't go far. They're so lost in their imaginations, it's almost as if they forget to play."

After awhile, Lilli and Johannes came over to me, eyes solemn. "We have to ask you something, Grandmama," Johnannes said.

"Something of great importance," Lilli added. She looked at Johannes, who said, "It was your mother, it was Auntie Martine who first said it, so I think you should be the one to ask."

Lilli shuffled a little on her feet, then spilled it out. "Mama says that we could have been nobles, if Grandpapa hadn't gone and done something foolish. That he would have been a Count, and that would have made Uncle Philippe and Uncle Louvel Vicomtes. Mama says that she would have gotten invited to King Albert's balls, and had her name in the society papers. Then Papa laughed at Mama and said that Uncle Louvel couldn't be a Vicomte, because the President of America wouldn't let him."

I didn't know whether to be amused or appalled.

"What happened, Grandmama?" Johannes asked. "Not that I'm sorry. I wouldn't want my Papa to be a Vicomte. Then he wouldn't have been able to marry Mama. That's what Aunt Martine said, anyway. Now that Grandpapa is dead, Papa can't be a Vicomte, can he, Grandmama?"

"Little ones," I said, "sit by me." Berthe had joined the swan-chasing and goose-feeding adventure, for which I was glad.

"When your Grandpapa and I first married, he decided that titles were something of the past. Now in France, even though there was no king like there is here in Belgium, there were still nobles. In America, where Uncle Louvel lives, there are no nobles and no kings, only a president and citizens, like in France. However, your Grandpapa believed that what was in a man's heart was what counted, not his name, or a piece of paper in the family chest that glorified his ancestors. I suppose on paper your father is a Count, although he has decided to not live like one. He can't really give it up – it's like part of your name, just as you will always be Johannes, and you will be Lilli."

"I don't understand," Lilli said.

"I do," Johannes proclaimed. "He didn't want to be Count de Chagny. He wanted to just be Grandpapa."

"That's right, darling. He just wanted to be Grandpapa." Tears stood in my eyes.

Every night throughout the week we swam with mermaids, killed pirates, fought with wild Indians, and loved the little boy in green who kept his pearly milk teeth.

Lilli and Johannes sat rapt on the big nurse's bed with me, while the little girls hid under a tent I made for them out of a blanket and two chairs. Mathilde and Genna stopped dressing dolls and poked their heads out long enough to hear the Lost Boys kill someone, or Hook chase Pan. Sometimes the little girls rolled and giggled, and like Wendy herself, Lilli scolded, "Don't be such a child! You're all such children!" while still such a mite herself.

"Keep the nursery windows open," Johannes said seriously every night.

"They have to stay open," I remarked, " as it's summer."

"You know," he said.

His little face was so thin. Johannes was tall, like Philippe, and his lanky thinness wasn't tempered by Anki's thick solidity. He was not a handsome child. His thin tight mouth smiled rarely. A too-large forehead wrinkled in unchildlike concentration. Deep brown eyes glimmered, revealing pools of sadness. His hollow cheeks never filled no matter how much porridge or ham steaks you fed him, and his thin, silky hair gave me a shiver of cold recognition when I brushed its shiny blackness. Philippe loved him fiercely, never mocking him for his slender body or the little stories he wrote in his ever-present sketchbook, and he always listened to his odd imaginations.

He can't leave the children in Belgium while he goes to London, I thought. Genna and Larissa have each other, and Roland, well, Roland is the exact opposite of Johannes, a chubby chestnut bundle of two-year old boy energy. But Johannes, he needs Philippe. There's a deep bond between these two, something in the blood that links them. Something from Erik.

I knew that Erik had left a cold and unloving house around the age of ten. It seemed so young, but many boys in that era, and even now, were apprenticed around that age. He left not for an apprenticeship, though, but to make his way on his own, to sleep in culverts or barns, tramping with rough men who lived on the roads. I shuddered to think of a child that young on the loose on the open roads that led through France, through Prussia, and through thick forested mountains on to the Balkans.

Had he been like Johannes, I wondered, sensitive, dreamy, and so much more vulnerable because of his horrific ugliness? I had seen a few of Erik's architectural sketches, his designs for the masonry foundations of the Palais Garnier. Surely he had he drawn as a child, but had he been mocked, seen his drawings torn up, or worse, ignored? I didn't know. All that came to me was the certainty, knowledge without basis, that Erik as a child had been very much like Johannes, and had been hurt, terribly wounded right at the age Johannes was today. Something speared right in that vulnerable spot of Erik's newly-opening heart, the heart that was just awakening to hatred, to loneliness, to cruelty.

Erik had a soft, childlike voice he sometimes used when, instead of yielding under the crushing mountain of sorrow, he cowered under it like a troll king hiding under his hill. There it was again, come to life once more in Johannes's quavering tones.

Erik's parents ... why couldn't they have just loved him? I thought, watching Johannes and Lilli as they sat under an enormous oak with spread-out branches hanging green and heavy. They were making crowns of pink clover. A few boys strolled by, and seeing Johannes with a girl, made catcalls. He ignored them.

You couldn't love Erik, a voice came back, cold and clear in the midsummer heat. When you told Raoul that greatly abridged story on the rooftop, all you could talk about was how horrible his face was, how cruel he had been to you. You had Raoul ready to take up arms and descend to the cellars himself, ready to kill him. Yes, Erik was cruel, brutal beyond belief, especially at the end. But once there was a child, a tall, thin, terribly ugly child who wanted what all children want, love, someone to sit them on a knee, someone's arms around them. By Providence, or an act of nature, that child was gifted with a peculiar intelligence, a remarkable sensitivity, a terrifying intensity. He could compel the will of men, but he could not compel love, and the more alone he felt, the more repulsive he became, until loneliness and repulsion almost destroyed him.

Philippe cannot leave Johannes, especially now.

Back home, Johannes and Lilli explored all through the house together. Genna wanted to tag along, but she soon fell back, baffled by the wall the two of them erected against everything else. "They make up games I can't play," Genna complained. "They use words I don't understand. And they won't explain them to me."

"Never mind," I said. "Come out to the garden with me, and we can help Cook pick raspberries. You can squeeze in all the places among the bushes that she can't."

"That's right," Genna crowed. "She's too fat!"

"Oh, Genna," I sighed, secretly laughing inside.

Every night we travelled to Neverland. It took us all week to read through till the end. In the final chapter, Peter comes back long afterward to find Wendy grown, her little daughter Jane in the nursery bed in her mother's place. The children heard me read the right words, the ones penned by James Barrie, but my heart spoke these:

_She had to tell him._

"_I am old, Erik. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago."_

"_You promised not to!"_

"_I couldn't help it. I am a married woman, Erik."_

"_No, you're not."_

"_Yes, and the little boy in the bed is my baby."_

It was right out of that dream of the early spring, when Erik came to lie with me. My voice cracked, the wriggling stopped, and two frolicking little puppies turned to girls as they joined Johannes' and Lilli's intent stares. I looked at the blossoming faces gathered around me on the big nursery bed, and broke down in tears.

"Grandmama," Lilli said, "it's not that sad. So what if Mama Wendy doesn't get to go back to Neverland? Jane gets to go, so it's all right."

Gay and innocent and heartless, as Barrie says. I felt like you, Erik, stabbed through by poignant, careless, and entirely innocent lack of heart.

o o o o o o o o o o o o

I blinked stupidly when Erik told me we were going out for a carriage ride. Yes, there was a world beyond these snug rooms. What did this mean, did he trust me now?

"Where?" I asked.

"To the Bois de Boulonge, around the circuit a few times."

"That will be pleasant," I said, thinking of Sunday afternoon rides in the bright sunlight, the women with plumes or great bows on their hats and their white dresses shining in the sun, the men all stiff in grey afternoon dress, with their light-colored silk top hats. Then I remembered, when Erik took me down here, it was in the dead of winter. Was it still that season, or now spring? "But won't it be cold?"

"The carriage is enclosed," he said. "Do you think I would take you out in the cold air and risk endangering your voice? I will bring a scarf, and wraps as well."

"So it is still winter," I mused.

He brought to me a huge bundle covered in thick paper.

"My fur," I said, amazed, as I untied the bulky package and peeled off the crinkly brown enfoldment. "How did you get it?"

"I sent a man to fetch it from the apartment."

I stared at it wildly, suddenly licked with flames of guilt.

"Your worthy Mme. Valerius is fine," Erik said quickly in his most brisk and authoritative voice. "She rests assured that you are with your Angel of Music."

A sad, cynical laugh burst out of me. "Simple soul. She would never to think to ask why someone who dwelt with an angel would need a fur."

He wrapped me in the long beaver coat, his hands lingering a little too long on the soft ruffled hairs. Then, fascinated, I watched him affix the odd partial mask that he used to travel about in the world above. He applied a little spirit gum to secure to his face the gutta-percha nose with a silky black moustache underneath. "You are staring at my whiskers," he said. "I cut some of what little remains of my hair, and wove it on. If I can spare some more," and here he laughed bitterly, "my new mask will look even better. I'll have sidewhiskers as well."

"I thought we were to have no more masks," I remarked.

"This is necessary, if we do not wish to be conspicuous. I am making a far better one, Christine, soon you will see it. I can wear it about all the time, and you won't be able to tell any difference." Then he applied greasepaint to his cheeks and around his eyes, to even up his skin tone. With a scarf and a wide black hat, he looked almost like someone who you would see on the winter streets of Paris, but still shockingly ugly. In some ways this disguise was worse. When he was unmasked, he was singular, monstrous, remarkable. With his false nose and makeup, he was in some ways more an object of horror, because his face was so close to a normal one, yet different in a dozen small disturbing ways. He looked not only dreadfully unattractive but aged as well, which I had never noticed when he sat before me unmasked.

"How old are you, Erik?" I asked.

He wouldn't look at me. "Fifty-two."

I said nothing.

"You think I am old, too old to love you."

It had never occurred to me. The first-place National Conservatory student in my graduating class was a dark little Parisienne with a soprano like Vienna crystal. She had married the professor in charge of the vocal program, disappeared into a beautiful villa southeast of Paris, and never sang onstage again. He was fifty-seven, and she twenty. In the world of talented young singers, May often married December, and no one thought anything of it.

"Love isn't a matter of age," I said quietly. "It's whether two hearts beat towards the same end."

He sighed heavily, and something went through me, pity for his lonely ugliness, pity for myself for sharing it. Not desire, for I had not again felt a twinge of desire for him since that night I fancied him a handsome noble hiding under some thrilling mask of concealment. But the heart can vibrate with pity as well as desire.

So well had he accustomed me to staying in my room while he opened his front door, that I headed there automatically. To my shock, he said, "You're going in the wrong direction." Then, more amazing, he walked over to that great slab of stone, and fiddled with a small mechanism that I had thought was some kind of doorbell that never rang. He reached behind it, flicked a switch, and the massive block slid aside easily. A cold burst of air smelling faintly of algae wafted in. Through that opening glimmered the faint whitish glare of very dim gaslights bouncing off the surface of the lake.

I stared at that opening. He put on his cloak casually, relaxed, and then drew on some leather gloves, and picked up a walking stick with an ivory ball on the end. My fur was warm, and a faint sheen of sweat accumulated on my lip. I could have walked right through that opening, but did not.

He gave a little impatient shrug. "What are you waiting for, Christine?"

"Nothing," I said, confused. "I don't know."

"You test my manners," and he made an exaggerated, elegant gesture towards the door. "Ladies first."

I stood on that stagnant shore, helpless, looking for the boat, but it was nowhere to be seen.

"It's time you began exploring the depths here. Come, I'll show you a far quicker way to the upstairs than you traversed when you first came to visit me."

We walked through a long straight corridor that ended in a thick old iron gate. From his pocket he drew a massive key, sculpted and ornate, and after several tries, he got the gate to swing open for him. "It does not always want to open, even for Erik," he said. "Then sometimes it opens by itself, a most temperamentally strange door."

He showed me the key, making as if to hand it to me, and then quickly snatched it away from my grasp when I reached for it. I glimpsed a little face carved into the handle, a smirking satyr with vine leaves twirling through its hair. "The chatelaine keeps the keys to the house," he said in a sly voice, "not the guest. If I were to let you go, and you were to come back to me, this is the route you would take."

To let me go. I had almost forgotten such a thing was possible. "It seems so easy. Why do people not find it, and come looking down here?"

"Virtually everyone has forgotten that this gate even exists, and should they remember, they would have no way to penetrate it. I have the only key, and you see it before you. If I knew you would return to me, I would give it to you, and then you could come back and see Erik, and help him finish his opera." His voice shook with emotion. "But we can speak of this later."

The long and twisted passageway that followed took us directly to the Rue Scribe. I had no time to look around at the strange and entirely entrancing fairyland of Paris, glistening at night under a fat golden moon. He bundled me quickly towards the waiting carriage, as if afraid I would be seen.

It was a gentleman's brougham, with wheels conspicuously painted bright red, although the vehicle itself and the shadowy driver were all swathed in deepest black. Apprehension seized me, because I associated a carriage ride with stiff mourning clothes and a handful of earth thumping against the outside of a coffin. My last trip in a brougham was when Professor Valerius died, when one conveyed Mama and myself to the cemetery for his internment.

"To the Bois de Boulogne," Erik told the driver. "Around the outer circle, behind the ractrack." Erik didn't offer his arm to me, but instead blocked me from behind with his body. Perhaps he thought I would bolt after all. I clambered awkwardly into the finely appointed carriage on my own.

Our conveyance was fine but small, seating only two, and both facing forward toward the driver. I nestled into the luxurious cushioned seat, my skirts crowding up against Erik sitting stiffly beside me. Then he leaned across me with his long arm, and started to pull the blinds down on my side. His arm brushed my breast like a breath of wind that barely stirs the tree, and he jerked away abruptly, dropping the blind cord. He groped for it but the grommet on the end was impossible to find in the dark.

"Never mind that, I want to see," I protested. He sighed and pulled his own blind shut. I breathed deeply. The interior smelled of leather and the oil used to lubricate springs and axles, the cold night air, and a smoky, musky cologne which Erik had dabbled on his person.

I stared out at the brightly lit boulevards. No child seeing his first Yuletree all bedecked in candles and silver paper stars enjoyed the sight of that street as much as I. Out and about, I felt like a fairy captive who had been in the enchanted land for months or years, but who to the outside world had been gone only days. I sucked the frigid air into my lungs as if it were the draught of life itself.

It was still winter. The remnants of a recent snow collected in the corners between buildings and staircases. Everywhere else, the crowds churned it to a light slush. The white bobbing faces of the passersby looked like icy, glaring masks, not like people at all. I suddenly felt disoriented and afraid. "How long?" I asked, fighting rising panic. "Erik, how long?"

"Two weeks," he said in a flat voice.

Two weeks. Surely I'd woken and slept more than fourteen times. I couldn't count, couldn't remember, and stared out the window like a sleepwalker.

There were many years when I asked myself, why didn't I scream out the window for help? True, the driver was in Erik's pay and might not have assisted, but when the carriage sat unmoving, waiting to proceed through the intersections of the boulevards, I gaped at the view like a peasant coming to Paris for the first time. More than once we passed brightly uniformed policemen, and I regarded them as another part of the scenery rather than potential rescuers. The inside of the brougham door had a latch that kept it secured, but to open it would have been a simple matter of lifting the lever and kicking the door open with my foot. Any sign of a man struggling with a lady trying to exit a carriage would have caused a great stir on the street. Yet I did nothing.

We turned onto the broad avenue that led into the Bois de Boulogne. Even though it was dark, many carriages crawled slowly around the concourse. We passed by a group of four or five women trying to attract the attention of carriage-riders, and I looked away, embarrassed. I had only been to the Bois during the day, never at night. It wasn't the same cheery Sunday promenade.

We turned off the main boulevard, heading towards a dark and heavily wooded section of the park where the gaslights didn't penetrate. "You've been here before," I commented.

Erik, normally so voluble, shifted uncomfortably in silence. A few lights shone from the racetrack, but the path along which we slowly crept sheltered under a thick gloom of bare branches that arched overhead like buttresses in some lonely, forsaken cathedral. He started tapping his foot rapidly, which made the carriage floor vibrate.

"Stop that, Erik," I said.

Like a rebuked child, he became entirely still. Then he said in a low voice, "Christine, have you been happy these past weeks?"

Had I? Like a distant memory of childhood, one that forms before words and thus leaves little mark on the mind, I recalled curses, shouts, blows, and his body on mine, followed by a snarling face with huge square teeth almost pressed into my face. A thick cocoon of well-being swathed those unpleasant recollections. Tea eased my pain, his fire warmed me, conversation entertained me, and quiet restored me. Little did I know that the worm stirring within swaddling silk would soon enough emerge as a death's-head moth with wide dark wings, bent on rampant destruction.

"Is the canary in the cage happy?" I asked.

"When it sings."

"Then I cannot sing, for only the males do that."

"What would make you happy? What makes a woman happy?" he sighed, twisting his gloved hands. Then he rapped sharply on the carriage with his walking stick, signalling the driver to stop near a little copse of trees, off the path. I couldn't see out his window, as he kept the blind down, but through mine the entire section of the park looked deserted. "I insist that you tell me, because I want your happiness above anything else. That's what I've tried to show you all this time. Hasn't Erik done his best? There's nothing Erik hasn't given you, nothing."

"My freedom," I whispered faintly, not even knowing what that was anymore.

He heard me, for he echoed, "Freedom. Who among us is free? Are we free of the accident of our birth, our country, our language? Are we free of the accident of our face, of our voice," and here he laughed richly, cynically. "Are we free of our appetites? Yes, the Church would like us to think so, with little fables of saints who lived on nothing but communion wafers, or men who never hungered for a woman's touch. We rent something we call freedom, but it is always obtained at the expense of another, one who pours her blood into us and expects something in return, something better than bitter disappointment. No woman who bears a child is free, and no child born of woman is, either."

I sat back and looked out the window. A carriage approached, and as it passed us, Erik shrank back into the shadows. The moon shone right through the windows of the moving vehicle. Outlined in sharp silhouette sat a large, wide-shouldered man in a top hat. Silvery light etched the hint of his double chin above his high collar. The woman with him had on a plumed hat, and she sat very close to the man, almost draped across his broad chest. Their driver slowed a bit as they passed us, and the man turned his head slightly to get a better look inside, but his face was entirely black, surrounded by a bright circular halo of moonlight. A pause, and then they clip-clopped on.

When the sound of hooves receded into the night, Erik relaxed. "So you see," he went on, as if the others had not passed us at all, "Erik does not offer you the illusion of freedom. Were you to continue singing at the National Opera, you would tread on a mill from rehearsal to performance to reception and back again, until when? Until you ended up like that great former and now-broken war horse, La Carlotta? She is finished, she knows it. She will wind up in a furnished room somewhere, teaching watery brats how to hit C above the middle, if she's lucky.

"I know your heart, Christine. You poured it out to me in your dressing room, when your miserable Erik was only a voice in the darkness, and you opened up to me, when you trusted me then without question. I heard your complaints about the stultifying, rigid vocal education you received, how before I manifested to you, your voice was in danger of failing entirely from strain and abuse.

"You told me how tired you were, how little you earned for how hard you worked, and how much pressure you were under to find yourself a special friend, a protector. You dodged men in the hallways, you said, and hoped that the lock on your dressing-room door would hold. Could you tell how enraged I became when you said that, when I thought of you at the mercy of some unscrupulous man who wanted only to exploit you, to wrap himself in your charms for a little support? Why do you think I forbade you to even think about men and their ways? It was all for you, my concern to protect you and keep you safe. Admit it, Christine, the theater is not your life. You have said so many times yourself, when we talked after lessons. Nor is your life caring for an old woman out of guilt and obligation."

"I don't know what my life is, anymore."

He tapped the side of the carriage again, and we jolted to a walk. Erik twisted his shoulders towards me, leaning forward, imploring. "Look, take these hands, they're gloved so you will not shudder. Erik offers you not only a refuge from the stage, if that is truly what you want, but peace and protection as well. It's very simple, really, to keep Erik happy. Loyalty is all he requires, Christine, not even love. Erik does not ask for love. But I think that love could grow, if you gave it time. You aren't afraid of me, are you, anymore? Be honest, because Erik knows if you lie."

I let my hand lie like a dead thing in his. Even through his thin leather gloves I could feel the chill. "I'm not afraid of you anymore, it's true."

"And didn't I say that would happen?" Insistent, leaning forward, the false nose almost touching mine.

"You did, I admit."

He leaned back with a satisfied sigh. "Then why do you doubt me when I say that even though you do not love me now, you will?"

"Because it's not my experience," I said.

"And what vast experience of love is that?"

I thought of tender, nervous Raoul in the garden at Perros, erect in his uniform, warmly kissing my hands. The silk on his upper lip was barely perceptible, and it made me want to stroke it with my finger to see if it was really there. There was that terrible new shyness, something foreign that overshadowed the memory of our silly games, but powerful too. It flew in on soft brooding wings of longing that fanned me with regret when he jaunted away up the road. He looked back to wave, hair white in the sun, and then he was gone. "Nothing," I said. "I know nothing of love."

The moonlight glittered on Erik's eyes, making them glow like candle flames in the dark ruin of his face. What experience of love had I had? Some caresses that fueled years of fevered imaginations, fantasies that never came to fruition. Raoul went to the naval academy that summer, and it was as if he had died at sea. Papa shut me up in a room with him the two years before he died, and it's as if I wasn't in Paris at all. Not that it mattered, for when I walked to and from the Conservatory, it was if I was encased in a block of ice, or veiled like the women of Algiers. I wanted nothing to do with men or their glances in my hard, rigid little heart.

That fall so long ago, that fall of 1880, the ice of my heart melted in that sweet autumn when I found my secret. Something strange and poetic and best of all, real, real as houses and streets and the cab-horses whose flanks I loved to stroke, had come to me, and me alone. If it sounded like fantasy, it was nothing new to me to love a fantasy. For years Raoul was a memory that haunted the furrow of my nights, while in the sunlit hours I gave up dreaming that he would write, much less come back and seek me out. My soul waited expectantly for a miracle and prayed for it to descend like a dove out of the wide-split heavens. I wanted to be in love, and if anyone asked me then, I would have said I was in love, but with what I could not tell. With a faceless, bodiless voice. With a spirit. With a god.

Then I glimpsed Raoul in an opera box one evening with his broad, brooding brother, and the tinkling crystal fantasy crashed, fractured, to the marble floor beneath. Now, I sat in a silver-lit carriage in the middle of the Bois, feeling cold and very grown-up, sharing in the weight of Erik's age.

His voice jerked out of him, abrupt, petulant. "I've taught you other things than how to sing."

"Such as?"

"Tell me about these two weeks with me. Tell Erik what you learned."

I closed my eyes, suddenly weary. It couldn't have been only two weeks. Searching for a single memory, nothing appeared except the glow of lamps under rich red or green shades, the fire that never ceased or banked, the sounds of harp or piano.

"Nothing, Erik. It's as if I did nothing."

He crowed triumphantly. "How do you feel now?"

"As if I'd been on vacation in the Alps for a month. As if I'd taken a rest cure. Not that I've done either of those things, but they say they're invigorating." For it was true. "But one can't do nothing forever."

"Of course not," he said impatiently, waving his long black hand. He rapped for the driver, who stopped at the entrance to the Bois. We had come full circle. "Open the door, if you wish."

"What?" I said, staring at him.

"You're free to go, or, if you desire, I can return you to Mme. Valerius's apartment."

"Erik, why?"

"Because you're no longer afraid of me, and you learned what I wanted to show you, while you stayed with me. You have seen my face and lived, and I think you will even come back if I ask you to."

A woman came up to the carriage, hat askew, face brightly painted, but when she saw me she made a disgusted motion with her hand, and walked off.

"There's that, or marriage," he remarked in a cold and off-hand way. "There's nothing in between."

"That can't be all," I said.

"Or the nunnery. Although I hear these days that they require a terribly large dowry, unless you want to be a lay-sister laundress washing wimples the rest of your days. Shall I deliver you to a convent, Christine? I would even provide the money, if you wished, because I would hate to see those beautiful white hands ruined with scrubbing instead of folded in prayer. You want freedom, but even a wife or whore are freer than the inmates of the nunnery."

I shrank at the coarse word. To the woman who peered in our window, or to the men in black who clustered in the foyers of every theater in Paris, I was no better than one. Warmer, better fed, better dressed, but under the skirts, no different.

The black carriages slowly paraded by, more leaving the Bois than entering now. Women moved around the periphery of the drive, perhaps sensing their last evening's chances passing them by. The woman with the crooked hat climbed into a berlin with two men.

"So what do you offer, Erik, if not the convent, or serving as a nursemaid, or a life of dissipation?"

He grew pale under his flesh paint, and he made a little choking sound. Then he opened his window and leaned his head out, calling to the driver, "Back around the outer circle."

The wind had died down and I snuggled warmly into my fur. It had taken the last of my savings, and a little of Mama Valerius's as well. Practically every woman above the level of chorus girl had a fur, but I was one of the few to have earned mine with my own voice, rather than on my back.

"Thank you for fetching my coat," I said. "I don't know how I could have managed without it."

He rested his hands on the sleeve, and I didn't pull away. Then he took off his gloves. "Please," he said, and I felt a little sick. Now, is this where it starts? He rested his bare hand on the fur, and I saw how white it was in the moonlight, but not the same kind of white all over. There were spots on the back of his hand, unlike the spots older people have. These were larger, rougher-looking. The tips of the fingers on his left hand were thickly calloused, from fretting the violin. His nails were short and scrupulously clean, the knuckles wider than the fingers themselves. He didn't press on my sleeve, but held his hands aloft on the tips of the fur, running them back and forth gently, caressingly. I felt nothing. Had I not seen those spectral hands caressing the dark glossy brown silver-tipped with moonlight, I would not have even known they were there.

"It's beaver," he murmured, "but a cheap one. You deserve sable, Russian sable. Have you ever touched it? The pelt is thick and short, almost blue in its blackness. It's dear in Paris, but in St. Petersburg it's common as beaver is here."

"You're a man of means, then, Erik? For even in St. Petersburg, I imagine one needs many _kopecks_ to obtain one."

"Ah, we're down to the negotiations. Since it doesn't sound like your Mme. Valerius is quite up to it, and since your Papa is conducting a concert for the worms six feet under, of course I must negotiate with you. Is that something that matters to you, that I have some wealth? Not as much as the old noble families, of course, but then again, seeing that I am the son of an artisan, we wouldn't expect that, would we?"

My eyes stung at the mention of my father. "I hate all this talk of money and marriage. It's all the bourgeois girls think of. There's no love in it."

"Back to love again, I see. If love is your measure, then I have more love to offer you than all the men of Paris combined. Don't wave your hand at me, for Erik is tired of that promise, it bores him and he no longer feels constrained by it. I can offer to buy you for a certain number of francs a year, as you rightly observed about the bourgeois, or I can offer everything I have to you, and you have no idea what that entails now, Christine, no idea at all. For instance, you have seen for yourself the work of my hands, and heard the work of my heart, but I have not yet shown you the work of my mind.

"So rest assured, that yes, a sable coat for a beautiful woman is not going to get Erik in trouble with his bankers, and that I would let you lack for nothing, especially love."

I sat back, reeling. This wasn't exactly a proposal, not yet. "But I don't love you. And you can't buy me with a sable coat, not that it would keep me warmer than this one, anyway."

He sighed, low and deep from the chest. "There's no love for Erik in you at all? Then why do you sit here still?"

"I don't know," I said simply. "It's warm, and I like to talk to you."

Shifting nervously, as if he found no comfortable position, he said softly, "You know I would die for you. If I had no hope that you would never, could never love me, I would have no life left at all."

"That's foolish. Don't talk like that."

"I'm weary of living. Fifty-two years, especially when so much of it was spent sleeping in tents or on the ground, is a long time. I have been all over Asia and Northern Africa, and I've seen terrible things, wonderful things, sights that would bring blood to your eyes. Sometimes I want nothing more than to take my manuscript, lie down in my bed, and fall asleep without waking. I could do it, I know elixers to make one sleep as if dead, or stay awake for days, or drift in a dream halfway between the two. I can end life entirely without pain, with just a simple slip into sleep. I'm alone, Christine, there's no one and nothing left for me, and the one man I thought was my friend ... didn't Shakespeare say that, if a man sheds blood with you then he is not only your friend but your brother? oh, that man is no longer my friend, no longer a friend of Erik's."

"I don't know Shakespeare. You know I can't read English. Perhaps you should make up with this man, if he's your only friend. Besides, Erik, it's where you live. How can you have friends, living in a cellar?"

"Perhaps I shall not have to live in a cellar anymore. Perhaps, just perhaps, there might be a reason to emerge." This he said with such convincing pathos, that a rip of pity went through me.

The full moon went behind a large over-arching stand of trees, and darkness filled the inside of the carriage. We swung around a lake with a small island in the center. Fat little putti, frozen in marble, shone white in moonlight as colorless and cold as Erik's face.

"Who do you think those men were," he said, "riding around the Bois at this time of night?"

"No different from us, I imagine, as we're out at this time ourselves."

"Little innocent. If their moustaches are thick, they're men with wives at home, wives who know nothing of their late-night expeditions until the doctor discovers in them the itch that has no cure." He stretched his hand out towards the little lake. "As all of Paris is my witness, there is more love in my heart for you than in all of the married men of this city, in all the hearts of those in this great Babylon on the Seine combined. You will find my heart entirely given over to you, as if I had ripped it out of my chest personally. I would kill myself before even thinking of another woman besides you. Very few men in Paris can make that promise, and fewer still can keep it."

"There are faithful marriages," I protested. "Not all men are like those that roam the corridors of the theater."

"Yes, and ours will be one of them, were you to accept me."

"Accept you? Are you suggesting that we be engaged?"

He spat out low laughter. "I don't believe in engagements. Did you know, Christine, that what we think of as the marriage ceremony is actually two parts, and that it is the first part that makes the true marriage? The man and woman make promises to each other, and the man gives the woman a ring. They give themselves to each other in body, and then there comes the public celebration, the elevation of the couple before society. But the ring, the promise, and the joining of bodies make the marriage. The rest is social posturing, the elaborate ritual of the Church, which feels it must intrude into everything. Think of it as a secret marriage, if you like, a marriage between us until we can go before the altar."

He must have divined my expression, for he went on, "Oh, I will marry you in the Church if you want, Christine, why not, why not the Madeleine itself? Would you prefer that? Does such a marriage seem more real to you? I have a nuptial Mass that I have already outlined, and the Madeleine's choir could no doubt do it justice. We would take out announcements in _L'Epoque_, and all of _le touts Paris _would come with their wives and marriageable daughters. It would be the society event of the season ..."

"Stop," I held up my hand. "You mock me, and I don't like that. Further, you mock marriage."

"You mock me," he retaliated, and once again I felt the full weight of his age. "I don't mock marriage. They mock marriage," he cried out, waving his arm at a few slow coaches on their way through the Bois. "I get down to fundamentals. You have heard my heart's work, and you know I strip every emotion, every action of unnecessary sentiment and boil it down to the bone. This is the living bone of marriage I offer you, because Erik offers you the living, bleeding bone of marriage to go with his weeping, breaking heart, both for you to take in trust as your own. Look," and he fumbled in his pocket, bringing up a little velvet box. "This represents everything. All of it, do you understand?"

"Don't shout, please," I begged.

He thrust it into my hand. His own ungloved ones were like blocks of ice, and I jumped. He moaned pathetically, but I could not bear to meet his glance, so instead I stared at the little box's velvet outside for a long time. The moonlight washed all color out of it, leaving only darkness. When I looked back up, tears ran down Erik's face, and he shook like someone dying of cold. I started to shake too.

"What is it?" I whispered, but I knew.

"Open it," he said. "Open it if you dare."

I pried the top open, though when my shaking fingers slipped, the top snapped shut on my finger. Blinking away tears, not wanting to cry out, I pried it open again. Inside was a thick gold ring.

"Pick it up," he said. "Feel it, test it, weigh it, see what I give you. It represents everything material I have on this earth, money, all my goods, the work of my hands and heart and mind, every last scrap of furniture, everything I have ever created. It represents my promise to you, that it is I who loves you, and will never, ever leave you."

I placed the ring in my palm. It was thick, thicker than a wedding band normally was, and not only deceptively heavy for its size, but softer than it should have been, round and honeyed. Even in the moon's rays it glowed with a gentle yellow luminosity. "What is it made of ? I've never felt anything like it."

"It's gold, unalloyed by anything. Normally the king of metals is mixed with silver or copper to make it hard. But this ring, Christine, is pure, 24 carat, and that's why it is soft and shines with a luster that you almost never see, because the addition of baser elements diminishes its opalescence. Yes, it will crack as it ages, and it can even break or bend, but so will your poor Erik become even more cracked and damaged than he is now. That won't matter, for we can have it polished, just as if you accept me, you polish away the flaws and cracks of this man who loves you."

The ring warmed itself quickly in my hand, and I caressed around the edge, shivering. It felt like a living thing in my palm, no longer cold, waiting for my finger to penetrate its buttery softness.

"How did you know the size?"

"When you were indisposed, you drank herbal tea and closed your eyes before my fire. I measured your finger with a thread while you slept."

"Can I still sing on the stage, Erik?"

"With my permission, if I think it is a suitable role worthy of your talent, and if you are in good voice. I will care for you, Christine, and with me you can become a great singer, if you wish, or you may rest satisfied as my muse. I, Erik, am a man. But the angel of music has indeed filled you with flame, and will do so again, if you let me care for you. That is the essence of my promise. That is what your father would have wanted. Can you imagine what he would have said, had he heard you sing Marguerite at the gala so long ago? Would he have given you over to me, could I have asked him for you? I think he would have, yes, I think that would have been his fondest desire, the apogee of his hopes for you."

He sat in the corner of the carriage, so tall his hat almost grazed the top of the interior. I thought I had grown a scar over that tender place Papa left behind, that place so raw with sorrow, sweetly smelling of pipe tobacco and violin rosin and the straw in my hair, of the sounds of the bow across catgut, squeezing me with beauty until the tears came. Apparently not.

Papa, I cried out in my heart, I don't know what to do. Choked with emotion, I slipped the ring's heavy density back into the jewelry box.

"I need some time," I said in a low tone. He moved his face close to mine, and I thought, this is madness, if he tries to kiss you you'll shrink away, you can't help it. Oh, God, why did You have to make Erik so ugly? Father Damien kisses the lepers of Molokai with affection, washes their sores, and even shares his pipe with them. As for me, even the thought that Erik's mouth might touch mine makes my lips curl in protest. Gloved in the most supple leather, his hands still repulse me.

He didn't kiss me. Instead, he unsnapped my beaded bag and slid the jewelry box in. "Perhaps you will tell me tomorrow," he said quietly. Then he leaned back and opened the window to speak to the coachman. "Where shall we go, Christine? To the Opera, to Mme. Valerius's apartment, or perhaps to that convent?"

As I closed my eyes, dark-stained walls slid into view behind my lids, their rough surfaces covered with brown-striped paper streaked with water. The floral pattern on a worn hand-knotted rug no longer disguised the spilled tea stains. I heard endless prattle, meaningless tears, perennial clacking of the rosary beads, babble about spirits and miracles and the smell of roses wafting off the manure-clad feet of some peasant girl. I'm so weary of it. So weary. Swallowing my guilt, I said, "What will happen to Mama Valerius? I can't leave her high and dry."

"She will be provided for," he said simply. "Erik gives his word."

"To the Opera," I whispered.

(_continued_)


	12. Work of His Mind

**Work of His Mind**

Genna loves trains. While she plastered her face to the dirty glass of the window, Johannnes snuggled up against me and drew in his sketchbook. I leaned over to see it, but he hid it with his hand and said, "Not until I'm done."

Every bit of livestock, every creek, every farmhouse was worthy of exclamation from the little chestnut miss. She counted cows until she lost track at over twenty. Then, as she fidgeted, I gave her a few bits of barley-sugar stowed away just for that occasion. Finally Johannes was done. "Here it is, Grandmama," and he pushed the book over to me.

He'd drawn Lilli – not the most accurate representation, for his lines still scrawled and his figures still had the childish distortions of size and proportion. But it was she, without doubt. He'd caught her mannerism of resting her chin pensively on her hand, staring out into the mist, and how the blonde tendrils kept escaping her tightly-bound braids. There was the slight curve of her cheek with just a touch of shading to round it out.

"Look," I said to Genna, "it's a perfect likeness of your cousin."

Johannes beamed. "I'm going to marry her someday," he announced.

"That's horrid," Genna said. "She's a girl!"

I laughed in spite of myself. "You have a long time before you think of marrying," I remarked.

"It doesn't matter," he stubbornly replied. "I am going to. I asked her this week."

"And what did she say?"

"She said of course, you silly, whom else would I marry?"

Deeply I sighed. Johannes's face grew longer and more mournful by the month, his eyes deeper-set and more incisive. "It's a beautiful drawing," I said. "Shall we send it to her by post, or leave it in your sketchbook for her to see when you go to the seashore?"

"In my sketchbook," he answered, and rested his head on my arm, eyes closed. Everything with him was touch, the feel of a pencil or eraser in his hand, the warmth of a hug. As childish as his illustrations still were, they had the suggestion of almost tactile living things. As Erik lived through his eyes and ears and voice, Johannes lived through his fingers long and strong for his age, through his skin. He fumbled at games and sports, but could take a watch apart and put it back together without a flaw. Adults and girls loved him, while other boys ignored him at best, and at worst called him a mollycoddle or teacher's pet. Philippe wasn't concerned. When he gets some muscle on those long arms and legs, he remarked, then he'll thrash them.

I stroked Johannes's thin black hair soft as silk, and looked out the window. Genna had exhausted herself hopping up and down to see outwards, and now rested her head on my lap.

We passed through fertile fields wide and heavy with golden grain. The thickly-packed heads almost made the stalks bend over, but they were not yet ripe. From my own childhood an old anxiety learned early in life clutched at me. This was the most vulnerable time, when the harvest was not quite ready for the reapers. Thunderstorms, hail, a sudden frost could ruin all. My mother and father would hold each other and pray for another few weeks of good weather, so that the ripening could finish.

A single storm could cut a field down in its prime. A cerebral storm, is what the doctors had called it when they brought Raoul home unconscious from his office at the Bourse. One said apoplexy, another said an aneurysm. All I knew was that the heavens opened a cloudburst of blood inside my husband's fair head, the head that still bore substantial gold within the grey.

Both of my husbands died in the same age of their life, in their early fifties, both fields of wheat mowed down before fully ripe. I hugged Genna and Johannes a little tighter.

We got off the train at the Grobbendonk station, the children clutching their little bags and I my carpetbag. The sun slanted down just enough to propel that golden afternoon into rosy twilight. There was Philippe, tall and slouching by the trap, whose heavy black horse jingled the reins. The children ran to him and he wrapped them in those long strong arms. After he had deposited them in the back seat, he kissed my cheeks and helped me up into the front. We rode in silence for a time, as the children chattered to him about their train ride, about Peter and Wendy, about how Johannes always wanted the nursery window open. Philippe did not believe that children should sit always silent around adults, and for that I was grateful.

We pulled into a narrow lane sheltering under alder and ash. I said to Philippe, "I'm going to Perros-Guirec in September."

"Why would you want to go then?" he asked, genuinely surprised. "I knew you didn't want to come and stay with Anki here, but you didn't have to run away to Perros to make your point. It will be grey and cool, and no one will be there."

"That's the appeal. And it's not that I don't want to help you. We're almost at the house, Philippe, so I won't waste time. I don't think you should leave your family."

"Then tell Anki. She's the one who's so adamant about staying in Belgium."

This was a new wrinkle, and almost bursting with anxiety I finally managed to talk to Anki in the kitchen. Her cook was off for a half-holiday, and so I snapped beans from the garden, long green ones with fat waxy seeds, and she rolled out dumplings. Flour covered her plump forearms, and her black curls kept escaping her red paisley kerchief. Something savory with onions simmered in a large black kettle on the stove, and in the warmth and cheer of the big kitchen, some of my sadness from the train ride slipped away.

"What are you going to cook those dumplings in?" I said in Flemish.

"Pork meatballs with onion broth. They've just started boiling." Then she looked at me sideways with a complicit look. "Mother has already written me."

"She didn't waste any time."

"She never does. If there's a leaf on the front steps, she'll sweep it off. The moment the bread dough rises, she's there to punch it down. She doesn't miss a step."

I waited, unsure. "It's not something a mother really wants to bring up, especially when her daughter is mistress in her own household."

She hung the thick dumplings on a rack to dry out a bit, and took the beans from me to put on to boil. "My life is here," she said. "What about my garden? We dig potatoes out until December. I might as well let the apples rot on the ground, as there will be no one to eat them this winter. Mother knew my thoughts, though. She said in her letter, 'Your home is with your husband.' But London, I don't know, Mother de Chagny. We'd have to live in an apartment."

"You grew up in a flat, over the glass shop."

"I know, and that's why I prefer living someplace like this."

"What does Philippe say?"

"He wants me to be happy. He doesn't want to insist."

I took a risk. "Anki, I never figured you and Philippe to have a cold marriage."

Her face was ruddy from sun and exertion, so it didn't change color, but the tender flesh around her collarbones did. "He's a lusty man," she said softly, "and he awakened it in me."

"As it should be. It's not shameful, Anki. It's one of the greatest joys given us in this life. Which is why you both would suffer for not sharing the quilt all winter."

"It's not just shame. But it's not fitting to say more."

"Then, there's Johannes."

She hung the last of the dumplings on their wooden rack, and seated herself across from me, the rickety wooden chair creaking a little under her soft weight. "They can dry a few minutes longer. It makes them fluffy. It was Johannes that made Philippe wonder if we shouldn't stay here. Boys don't like him. Philippe wrote to inquire about the schools in England, and they sound like they're all games and competition and bullying."

"Some would think that toughens a boy up. But you two don't seem to."

"Philippe thinks he will toughen on his own as he grows. He's just not sure if transplanting him is a good idea."

"If you're worried about a school, you can engage tutors."

She laughed. "That costs dearly."

"Not so much as you'd think. Besides, Anki, Raoul's estate was substantial, and Philippe will come into his share. I still have to go to Paris to get everything settled with the lawyers, and those are just the French holdings. No, don't look like that. It's not charity. It's your husband's patrimony. It's for Johannes, if you need it."

"Philippe said there was a neighborhood where we could live, a few tram stops from the medical college, directly next to a large park. Hyde Park, I think he called it."

"You see? He does want you with him, if he's already looking for flats."

"Everyone will have to learn English, I suppose."

"The children will learn it quickly. I knew only a little book French when I moved to Paris, and I was almost thirteen, far older than your children. Even so, I soon chattered in it, even if I never sounded like a _Parisienne_. Nor did I know any Flemish when I came to Brussels."

"Your Flemish is good," she remarked.

"One thing I can do is memorize. I wouldn't have survived as an opera singer otherwise. Even when I didn't know entirely what I was singing half the time, the sounds just came out."

"Well, they say children absorb them quickly when they're younger. I won't know what they're saying. Philippe, now Philippe is masterful at languages. Besides, Johannes will miss Lilli," she said, laying the dumplings on top of the boiling liquid in the kettle.

"Yes, he will. You saw the drawing he made on the train."

"It's a deep love he has, Mother de Chagny. Don't just say he's a boy, and he'll change."

"You'll not hear that from me. Children can have a deep love for one another," I said, thinking far back. "Monsieur De Chagny and I met when I was a bit older than Lilli and Johannes, about thirteen, and he just a year older. I think children grow up faster now, for we were both as innocent as children of eight or nine. We played together all summer on the Brittany seacoast, with its caves and ancient lighthouses and standing stones, what they call the _menhir_. The fishermen told us they were left by the fairy people. The Christians came, the fishermen said, and made the fairy people angry, so they set out in boats for hidden islands off the coast of England, where the priests couldn't find them. They left their stones behind as a warning not to follow them. Was it true? I don't know, but we loved to think it was.

"Anki, before we go in. It's not about the garden, or languages, or living in a flat. There's something else, isn't there? You said it wasn't shame, but something else, something unfitting."

She looked away, and set the heavy tureen down on the wood-planked sideboard. "You know my births went easy, until Roland. After he came, I don't know what it was, it was as if the life had gone right out of me. I was in bed for two months, and nothing really felt right until six or seven afterwards. You can't know how Philippe and I suffered. He for me, and me for him, seeing him worry for my health, then fighting desire, trying to damp it down."

"But Roland's over two, and there hasn't been another one since."

"At what a cost you don't know. We wait as long as we can, and he comes to me, desperate. I open to him because I don't want him to take a mistress, but there's no joy in it for me, as I lie there and worry. Then no baby comes of it, and it tears me apart, all that fear, all that avoidance for no reason. At least if he left, I could put off having another baby a little longer, and with less on my conscience."

"Oh, Anki," I sighed. "Philippe is a doctor. Surely he knows," and I struggled to find the Flemish, "ways to ... ways to not have a baby. Other than having him move to London for a year."

Tears stood in her eyes. "The dinner's getting cold," she sniffed.

"It will wait," I said, and I put my arms around her soft sloping shoulders.

"I go to Mass every Sunday with my parents," she said, muffled against my shoulder. "They'll see me not take Holy Communion, and they'll ask."

I stroked her hair. "Not if you're in London they won't."

"You say this so easily. Had this happened to you?"

"Anki, after I had Louvel, I was very ill with fever, and had deep pains all through my chest, my belly. They thought they would lose me, but I hung on. I guess I'm hard to kill. Anyway, I slowly got better over the months, and at first, like you, feared another child. But none came. I don't know why."

"Were you glad?"

"At first I thought it was sinful, to be happy about something like that. Then I didn't worry about it anymore. I didn't try to be cured, so maybe that says something."

"I want more children, but not right away, and especially not in a strange land."

"Is it really just the faith, Anki? France is a country full of Catholics with small families. Everyone knows what is going on. It's not as if you want to spend your time going to parties and the theater every night, where children would just get in the way. You're devoted to your children. You just need a rest, to build up your blood. How can that be wrong?"

A dark shadow swept past the kitchen door, Philippe looking in. "The children are calling for supper," he commented. Then he saw Anki's wet face, and he came in, all tender concern. I let her go and she buried herself in his long arms, face against his chest.

"I'll see that the children are washed up," I said as I slipped out of the room.

Last night, as I prepared to climb into the old four-poster covered with one of Mme. Gyselink's velvet crazy quilts, Anki came in to sit for a few moments on the edge of the bed. She and the children were going with Philippe to England.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

When I woke up after our carriage ride, I knew at once that it was mid-morning. That short trip under the stars had brought me back to the world of time and seasons and clocks. I stood before him obstinately and insisted that he set my watch. He laughed a little, then adjusted it for me from a large and ornate pocket-watch hidden in his vest. He had me sing a few scales, then pronounced my voice unharmed by the cold air of the night before.

His ring still burned like an ember deep within the closed oven door of my evening bag. The smell of warm cinnamon bread and coffee told me that he'd already been out that morning. After finishing some toast, I sat down in his wingback chair and made another demand. "I want my sewing. My hands are idle, and that bores me."

He flew to my side. "Never," he said rapidly. "Never will I let you be bored. What kind of sewing do you want? Embroidery? Cross-stitch? Crewel-work?"

I shifted restlessly, not really wanting to sew, but instead wanting to test him. Something had changed, but I couldn't tell what it was, and this was a way to see. "I don't know," I said, determined to take the capriciousness of woman to the full extent. "Sing something for me. Something not of the opera."

Retreating, he sat down at the piano, then squirmed around in that restless way he had, when he didn't know what to do next. He played a few plangent chords, then began to keen and wail some Arabic-sounding melody, and I forgot my restlessness to lean forward, entranced. After a few moments I found the pattern, some odd scale that never quite resolved, and attempted to chime in with a countermelody. We went on like that for some time, two birds soaring and intersecting, but never meeting. Off he went into another melody harder to follow, so that my voice weakened, then drifted out altogether as he sailed off behind a horizon that I could not see.

"What was that?" I asked presently. "It was like a scale, but not quite."

"They never told you about modes in that vaunted Conservatory, that jewel in the vast belly-hole of the new Republic?"

"I remember something about them, not much."

"You weren't a very good student, were you?"

"No," I agreed, "I wasn't."

"It's an Arabic mode. You take the second and the sixth of a major scale and flatten them," and he illustrated on the piano. He leaned his head back and wailed that peculiar ululation again, and this time shivers went up my back. What sounded like warm feathers rising on an updraft now became some fiery spirit shrieking in on bat's wings.

"You have a dance in _Don Juan Triumphant_ that uses it," I observed. "It's all rhythm and movement, it carries one away. But no one will go home whistling it."

He snorted impatiently. "Have you given any thought to what I proposed last night?"

"No," I lied.

Quickly rising, he said, "That's understandable. You need to know everything about your husband, don't you? Next thing, you'll be asking for a pre-nuptial agreement, so as not to get cheated out of any property, eh? I'm even willing to take as a dowry your beautiful voice."

"Spare me the sarcasm, Erik."

"It is most amazing, you've been with me for two weeks now, and unlike Lady Bluebeard, you haven't found my nest of wives all hung in a row in the closet. But I have something else to show you, something better than errant wives hanging on hooks. Today I will show you the work of my mind."

He pushed aside a tapestry, a cheap machine-knotted scene of bucolic shepherds groping gaping shepherdesses, the kind displayed in piles in the department stores. Behind it was a door mounted seamlessly into the wall. As if at his command it swung open, revealing a space dark and ominous. The shadow swallowed him, and then a soft glow silhouetted his tall form.

"I shut off the gas in here while you were my guest. When I start working in here, time vanishes entirely. You would have thought you were walled up after all," and his tone hinted at mockery.

He beckoned, and I entered hesitantly. That first lampglow was met by others, until the room slowly came into focus. I gasped, and he laughed appreciatively.

The room appeared to be full of people, or some kind of waxworks. Then I gave a little scream, for what looked to be a body lay opened up on a slab of a table, tubes and wires protruding from its yawning, cavernous torso. That gutted cadaver had no head, but an entirely natural arm lying to one side, medium-sized and of indistinguishable sex. I lifted its hand and dropped it at once, so limp and cold. Like a corpse, but rubbery.

Behind me came the sound of a great clock being wound, and then a shuffling noise. Motion swept past the corner of my eye, and then I screamed in earnest, a loud sharp shriek, for out of the gloom a large waddling figure ambled towards me. It rolled back and forth, and most horrible, it was the perfect likeness of the old manager, Monsieur Poligny. Frozen with fear, I stood in its path and only moved aside just as its round, protruding stomach was about to touch me. It shuffled along slowly, with a faint humming sound, and when it bumped a table it made a sharp left turn and ambled off again until it hit the wall, only to turn left once again.

I heard Erik laugh, which made me shake with anger as well as fear. I turned towards him enraged. His low, nasty chuckle broke off only when the Poligny figure trapped itself in a corner behind another table, and circled ever leftward in mindless repetition. Tears ran down my cheeks as I watched him manipulate the figure's back, and the automatic man stopped stock-still as a statute.

"What in God's name was that?" I finally asked, wiping my eyes.

"It's an accurate representation of the former captain of our happy little ship of fools in the National Opera, is it not? Come over here and see. It's turned off, and anyway, it won't bite you, although it might have knocked you down had you stood there like a cow in the middle of the road."

Hesitantly I approached the short fat figure dressed in evening clothes. Its grizzled wiry hair felt real, as did the side whiskers and bushy moustache. I pinched and then slapped its fat cheeks, rubbery and resilient. Wire spectacles sat on the edge of its potato-shaped nose, and little red veins had been expertly painted around its tip.

"A remarkable work of art," I said, still shaking a little.

Erik beamed. He had entirely forgotten my tears. "Do you like it?" he said, leaning over me intently.

"It's terrifying. Up close I can tell it's fake, but if I'd met it in the gloom of the cellars, I would have thought it was him, no question."

Rubbing his hands together, he cackled with laughter like a great mischievous boy. Around the workroom lay various parts of bodies, gears, long coils of wire, springs laid out in baskets. Curious, I went back over to the figure laid out on the table and peered at the complicated arrangement of tubes and wires inside. He followed me over, looking over my shoulder.

"Look," he said. "See how the wires go through the limbs like nerves inside a body," and indeed, a thin net of silver traces branched out from the central core down to the limbs. "Springs attach to the wires and pull the arms and legs, so that my automata have movement. They're not just waxworks, for as you can see, I've taught them to walk. Nor is walking simple. It takes hundreds of coordinated movements to keep a body upright, to keep the legs synchronized and the rest of the frame balanced."

"Erik, these are remarkable," and once again he smiled, pleased. Never had I seen his face break into such brightness. I could almost look directly at him. Some of his frightful ugliness came from his mournful expression, but in this playroom of the mind his gloom lifted. He made me angry for frightening me, and angrier when he laughed at my fright, but his face was light as a boy's and my hurt feelings ebbed. "Whatever gave you the idea to make them, and what are they for?"

He motioned for me to sit on a high stool, and pulled another one close to me, his knees almost touching mine. "I lived in Persia for some years, working for the Pivot of the Universe," and he spat these words out sarcastically, "Nasir-al-din, the Shah of all Shahs. Yes, he really called himself that, and several other titles as garish and pompous. He lived in a great palace called the Golestan, with fountains, and an entire labyrinth of rooms, as well as the walled-off wing of the _andarun_ reserved for his wives and concubines. Nasir thought everyone was trying to kill him, and at one point or another someone always was, so he hired me to keep him safe from his enemies, and a good many of his friends as well. I learned to control doors and vents and windows with wires thin as these. Notice, Christine, these aren't really wires at all, but extremely thin coiled springs almost fine as thread.

"Later, when my work in Persia was complete, I moved on to the Sultan's court in Constantinople. He gave me a workshop full of the best watchmakers, skilled craftsmen expert at working silver, and it was there that I first integrated the controls I had mastered in Persia into automata that bore the human form. For really, when you look at it, the complicated series of movements and sequence of operations needed to control a set of sliding doors is based on the same principle as the movements of a limb. Look, there is a little mechanism here. When I wind the automaton up, this tiny device starts to spin. Then, if the body moves too far to the left or right, this gyroscope touches one or more of these wires. The wires pull the limbs back into the right line of motion, the contact of the spinner here ceases, and the figure once again is oriented properly. You see, several of these wires have to compensate and provide forces going in the opposing directions ..."

On he went, speaking more energetically, poking with his long fingers here and there inside the gaping dummy, not paying the slightest attention that the more his terminology became obscure, the more I yawned. His attention was instead more focused on the thousands of tiny calculations needed to determine exactly how hard or softly the little wires should pull. When he paused for a breath, I interrupted, "So what did you do with these things in Turkey, then?"

He looked over at me, as if surprised to see that I was still there. "We built several automata made in the form of the Sultan, and would position them in visible places along the ramparts of his palaces. When the British sent warships into the Bosporus, they reported seeing him or his generals everywhere, sometimes in more than one place at the same time. It confused them to no end."

"It would have been easier to just dress men up like him."

"How would we have tested them, otherwise? Anyway, the Sultan was greatly interested in the automata, not so much for confounding the enemy, but more to see if they could be taught simple tasks, and if they could be made simply and cheaply. What he thought of using them for, you see, was as soldiers, made in factories the way the French and British made carriages or guns or steam engines. The Ottoman sultan envisioned mass-produced soldiers that could have their weapons embedded in their bodies, soldiers requiring neither food nor shelter nor sleep."

"That's monstrous. And you were going to help him do this?"

He looked blankly at me. "Monstrous? More so than making a gun or boots? Is the denim factory reprehensible because it makes uniforms? Or somehow are the uniforms acceptable because they go on a man, a man that will be blown to bits by a shell or have his leg cut off when the bullet wound shatters the bone?"

"They're like chessmen," I whispered. "It makes war a game of chess, with toys."

"They are not toys," he snapped. "Anyway, they could do other things." His irritated sideways look told me I had deprived him of the pleasure he initially got when I marveled over his works. "As I said, if you were listening earlier, it is not necessary for such a control system to be packaged in human form. Simpler systems can put the heads on matches, or screw the bolts into a wooden frame, in other words, do the drudgery men and even little children do every day. Let me explain it more simply, to you as a farm girl. Why plow with an ox that you have to feed hay, or stable over the winter, when you could plow with a mechanical one? It would not even have to look like an ox; it might look quite different. It's not the form that determines the functionality of the automaton."

I wandered from my hard, uncomfortable stool, shaking my head at Erik's insane notions. Typewriters, motor cars, cables that carried telegraph messages across the Atlantic, farm machines that Louvel writes of in America that make the McCormick reapers look primitive – we knew nothing of those then. My parents had done the work of farm animals and their only reward was an early death on one hand and a beggar's life on the other, so in my simplicity Erik's words sounded like nonsense.

Over in the corner I noticed a figure I had missed. It was human sized and shaped, but covered with a sheet eerily shroud-like. "What's this?" I said, and pulled on it.

"Leave that be," he called out, rushing over to my side, but too late, for the sheet pulled away to reveal a woman dressed in a simple blue dress that fell to her knees, with a pair of loose trousers beneath. Her long unbound hair fell over her shoulders like crows' wings.

"Who is she?" I asked, but he said nothing, just shifted his weight nervously back and forth, rubbing his hands together. "I know," I said playfully, "was she one of your mistresses? Or perhaps one of Bluebeard's wives?" Then at once I was sorry, for he stuffed one of his long hands into his mouth, biting on it, and turned away.

I touched her cheek. She was rubber-cold like the fragmented body on the table, but it seemed wrong to touch her, almost too intimate. Her lips were full and her nose long. Over her intent, dark eyes many tiny hairs had been impressed into the mask of her face, so that thick black brows met over her nose. I did not find her face beautiful; it was too heavy and serious, but all the same she looked alert and intelligent. Her full bosom swelled out the front of her dress as much as her hips did the sides, and I wondered how realistically drawn she was under those silk blue draperies.

An irrational, childlike urge seized me to lift her dress and look. Did Erik mould her breasts out of foam and gutta-percha, testing the weight and feel of each to get them exactly right? I suddenly felt dizzy, almost sick, and before I could against my better judgment touch one of those breasts, just to satisfy my curiosity, I picked up the sheet instead. Gently I laid it over the silent woman's cold figure, not beautiful, but imposing.

Erik faced the wall silently, shoulders shaking, but with anger or grief I could not tell. "I'm sorry," I said softly. "She was real, wasn't she? She meant something to you." I shamelessly thought, but did not add, who would love him, looking as he does?

He looked wildly around the room as if seeing it for the first time. "I had almost forgotten that was there," he said. "Never mind, it's nothing, she's nothing, in any event, she's dead. She died a long time ago."

"In Turkey?" I asked, suffused with pity, embarrassed now that I had thought that there were no other loves before me.

"In Persia. Don't ask me how she died."

Something in his tone chilled me, and suddenly the room seemed filled with silent, inanimate witnesses that could at any moment move behind my back, or out of the corner of my eye, raising their hand in mocking accusation. I shivered at the thought of these blind, unthinking forms moving through the dimly-lit corridors and caverns beneath the Opera.

"Erik, I want to go into the drawing room. Please, can we leave?"

He opened the door for me, blew out the lamps, and shut the white stone door on that black pit of memory. Then he sank down into a chair and sat silently for a long time, unmoving, staring at the fire that never stopped. I went into my room and unbraided my hair to brush it out, a little annoyed that he had never yielded to my request for a proper vanity mirror. But I had learned to dress my hair simply, without eyes or another pair of hands, and so I let it fall out all loose, brushing away. It gave me something to occupy myself, something to distract me from Erik's terrible silent brooding.

It hadn't occurred to me to close my bedroom door. A small sound startled me, and there he stood in my doorway, staring at my hair with a fierce, desperate hunger. He had put on his false nose and greasepaint. Hastily I wrapped it into a loose mound on top of my head, attached with a few pins. Tendrils fell on all sides of my face, and I pushed them away in irritation at having been caught so unguarded, almost as if undressed.

"I thought your hair was curly," he said accusingly as I plaited it in a thick braid and wrapped it around the top of my head.

"Sorry to disappoint you. You've never heard of a curling iron? You heat it on the stove, and then use it to make locks."

"Another artifice of woman," he sniffed.

"But you enjoyed the effect," I said as I put in the final pin. "Rags work the same way. I used to tie my hair up in them sometimes."

"Rags at one end, rags at the other," in sing-song he went, and I stared at him, shocked, but he stood rocking gently in the doorway, lost in his own world. Then, returning, he focused his deep black eyes on me, and his face was ugly with anguish. "I will fetch your coat, and we will go out for some air." He still shook with emotion.

"Fine," I answered. "Is my dress suitable?"

"For a carriage ride, most acceptable."

He made no move from the door, so I said firmly, "I have to wash up. Please wait for me in the drawing room." Then he left, eyes full of doglike devoted love that didn't irritate me this time. That strange apparition in the hidden room haunted me. I could not stop wondering how she met her death.

I emptied my beaded evening bag's contents into my larger leather purse. There at the bottom was the velvet box with his ring. At first I thought to put it in the back of the bottom writing desk drawer, where I had stuffed my suicide notes, but decided that it might enrage Erik if he knew I left it behind, so in it went into the bag. The soft purse of light blue leather had been one of his gifts. It must have been a kind of traveling bag, for when it came from the _grand magasin _it already contained an ivory comb and a small matching pocket mirror, which I kept concealed from Erik. To my delight I also found a little stationery kit with gold pencil, some thick gold-bordered paper, and five small envelopes, all very neat and compact within a gold leather case.

When we stood once again on that algal lake shore, he said, "Show me how to get to the Rue Scribe exit," and so I retraced our steps from the night before, hesitant in a few spots, but finally coming to the heavy iron gate. It was open, and Erik cried out in suppressed fury. "I told you this door was strange and capricious," he snapped.

"Perhaps yours is not the only key," I commented.

He growled inarticulately, then pulled the gate shut and locked it, handing the heavy carved key to me. "Open it. Show me that you can."

I struggled and once almost dropped the key onto the muddy path, but after a few tries I heard the huge lock scrape open. Straining, I pulled the iron gate just wide enough so that one at a time we could squeeze through. He stood impatiently, tapping his foot, and so I pulled it shut behind me, and it locked more easily than it had opened. Fascinated, I looked at the little wicked face twined with vines as he held his hand out for it.

"It's not yet yours," he said as he snatched it from my grasp.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

We emerged into light purple twilight and a cold delicate rain. I sheltered under the wide stone archway and he went out to hail a cab, but it took a long time as the Rue Scribe was mostly deserted of vehicles. Finally a worn old berlin stopped, its springs sagging and squealing. Erik negotiated for a long time with the cabman, and it occurred to me, I could run away. He's not watching, it's a long way to the street, and anyway, there are other men walking about under their black umbrellas.

He beckoned impatiently to me, but I shook my head, I wasn't going out in that rain. The cabman was smiling, so Erik must have offered him a good amount of fare to take us wherever we were going. The big bearish man laughed, and handed Erik his own black, battered umbrella. "Don't blame her, mate," I heard the cabman say in his basso profundo rumble. "Looks like you'd best go fetch her," and so he did, conveying me across what felt like a wide wet sea of sidewalk.

The driver smiled and tipped his hat at me as I entered the cab. He's not Erik's lackey, I thought. Erik trusted me to stand under the archway on the Rue Scribe. Just one word from me, and this cabman will have a crowd around us and Erik in the hands of the police. I shook my head and Erik looked at me curiously.

"Nothing," I said.

The berlin was large inside, made for four. I sat on one side, and Erik on the other. He looked mournful, so I patted the seat next to me, but he shook his head, no. He didn't seem angry, just abstracted and quiet. We clopped on until we came to the vast ruins of the Tuileries Palace, rubbled and silent, broken teeth in a battered and bruised mouth. The charred remains of trees and the crossbeams of roofs lay in the blackened shadows of cracked stone walls.

"I like to come here," Erik said after awhile. "I have my own coffin, but that provides a rather limited point of focus. This is Paris's coffin."

Three weeks ago, I said to myself, I would have had no idea what someone was talking about, had they said that to me. "I know," I answered. "It's a reminder, this someday will happen to you."

"They want to demolish it. Rather, I think they should let it stand forever. If they remember why it burned, perhaps the rest of this city, perhaps France itself can avoid its fate."

"I didn't think you cared about any particular country, especially France. I thought you had no country."

"Perhaps, just perhaps, I have discovered that there are other things to contemplate besides one's own grave, and that life might hold one little ray of brightness it did not, until recently."

A little shudder went through me. I remembered his eyes going over my hair. The driver slowly went around the grounds of the huge ruin as night fell over what remained of the glory of empires past. Unlike the Bois de Boulonge, there were no women hiding in corners this evening, probably because of the rain, and no other carriages in sight.

He looked lost and forlorn on his side of the berlin, a tall boy made to sit on the stool all by himself. Once again I patted the side of my bench, and this time he slid over, positioning himself as far from me as possible on the cracked leather seat. He looked down at his highly polished shoes, his trouser legs immaculately pressed with their sharp crease, and swayed a little back and forth, another nervous tic of his. Downcast, he asked, "Have you thought more of what I offered you last night?"

In that evening I thought I had lost all fear of him, but the question that hung on my tongue struggled to get out, anyway. "I have to ask you some things, first."

"Then you agree to accept me?"

"I don't know, Erik. Perhaps it depends on your answer."

"What else is there to negotiate, Christine? I've already told you that everything material I have is yours, and that I want no dowry but your voice."

"It's not that. It's your ... your clockwork men."

"My automata," he corrected.

"Yes, the automata. Who is the girl? And how did she die?"

He jumped, startled, and at first I thought he was going to bolt from the carriage. Then he pulled his arms around his chest, not crossing them, for they were so long that they almost went around his body entirely, as he hugged himself, to keep himself together.

"So you want to know how she died," he said flatly.

"Who she was, and how she died. To be precise."

"Very well, Mademoiselle Curious, who someday will meet her death due to her chronic condition. You want to know. I strangled her. She died at my hands."

I gave a sharp gasp, and thought of fleeing the carriage myself. The cabman will help me, I thought. But not here, as it's too dark and deserted. I couldn't help but look at Erik's long gloved hands, black and gripping the jacket of his wool frock coat so tightly the knuckles stood out through the thin leather.

"With your bare hands?" I gulped out.

He laughed, cold and chilling. "Not entertaining enough for those whose death it was her role to amuse. No, I used an instrument silent and swift, which you must pray that you never see, although were I to use it on your pretty white neck you would not see it at all, as it would come at you swift as desert wind, and so devastatingly thorough that you would have no memory at all of how you died."

"This was in Persia."

"Oh, she was a criminal, a vile enemy of the Arsehole Around Whom the Universe Rotates, the Shah himself, and worthy only of a death at the hands of an infidel like myself."

"Erik, don't make me pry it out of you. What happened?"

His eyes full of accusation, he said, "Don't blame me for this story, as you in your insatiate nosiness wanted to know." Then his voice took on a sing-song, faraway cast. "When I was brought to the Shah's palace to build, I noticed thick wooden screens in many of the large public rooms. Even the legislative chamber itself had one, intricately carved into odd geometric shapes, or even with leaves and vines, for the Persians lacked the strict prohibition against representing things of nature and the human form held dear by some of their fellow Mahometans. The court's chief portraitist even wanted to paint me, imagine that, but I quickly disabused him of that notion. However, I digress.

"These screens had holes so tiny the light could barely seep through. Behind them I could see shadowy forms, thickly muffled. From the giggles and murmurings I grew to learn that these were the women of the palace, free to come and go behind the screen, to listen and watch as best they could. It turned out that my first assignment was to construct a series of mirrors and listening tubes, so that the sights of the public areas of the room, the areas not sealed off from view, could be seen by the women themselves as they sat concealed. Likewise, the Shah wished for them to be able to hear all that went on, even speech in far corners of the room that normally inaudible."

"That's odd," I remarked. "I thought the women of the East lounged around all day and took baths, or listened to mandolins."

"The sensual fantasies of the Salon painters," he snorted. "When I came to the Shah's court, he was a young man, proud and wounded from his defeats to the British at Herat. If he was angry and bitter, his mother the Khanum was even worse. Surely you remember Abraham and Sarah entertaining the angel in the desert, and when the angel told Abraham his ancient wife would conceive, Sarah was listening behind a curtain and laughed out loud? Thousands of years later, whether Mesopotamia or the Qajar dynasty, it had not changed. The women still listened, and the Shah and his generals, his counselors, his advisors in turn listened to the women. My job was to make them able to listen, and to see better, without being seen themselves.

"But they're kept confined," I objected. "How could they help? What did they know?"

"A remarkable amount," he said sternly. "Do not underestimate them. When I worked in the legislative halls, in the court chambers, in the salon rooms where diplomatic parties were held, the women would crowd behind the screen and chatter to me in French, very good French too, far better than what you hear in the gutters and alleyways of Paris, even. I had not perfected my nose, I had not even known then such a thing was possible, and so I wore a silk mask. They teased me about it, saying that I was neither man nor woman nor eunuch, for if I were a man or eunuch I would bare my face, and if I were a woman like them I would be on their side. Many a time was I tempted to press my face up against that curtain of wood or marble, and show them that which they mocked, but I had been warned never to try to look through it upon pain of a severe flogging.

"Then the women's space was cleared by the eunuchs, and I would go in and set up the system of mirrors and sound reflectors I'd designed, simple curved surfaces like mirrors, but with no silver on them. A series of them, and I could make sound bounce through a vast room like a ball tossed between children playing in the park. As I worked, I saw further screens in the walls, layers within layers of secrecy, and although I could not see the women I could smell their heavy rosy perfume, and I knew that they watched me.

"It was then I met the man who would become my closest friend, and then turn against Erik, but that was many years in the future. He was a young aristocrat, about my age, almost as tall as I and bright-eyed, clear-skinned, with a beautiful curved smile. Because he was the cousin of the Shah's favorite wife, he had been given a highly prestigious position, a kind of detective of security, to root out spies and potential assassins within the vast network of the Shah's wives' and concubines' relatives. For these cousins and uncles and brothers, as well as their wives and children, all came to visit their sisters or cousins in the women of the _andarun_, as in their apartments the women could receive them without the veil. This melange came and went all day and into the night, and my Persian friend was given a staff to help him. He sent for me to discuss how we could further monitor the women's relatives who came to visit.

"My friend had a half-sister, the youngest daughter of his father's fourth wife, for whom Nasir Shah had developed a momentary passion. Because he also loved his favorite wife so dearly, and because he had promised to ask her for her opinion about any further wives he would take, under her direction he made the girl his concubine, but gave her one of the better apartments, one that would have been more suited for a wife. She came to live in the Golestan Palace, and my friend visited her frequently and told me of her tears, her sadness, her homesickness for her seaside village. He was too prudent to say so directly, but she especially despised the Shah's mother, who needled her ceaselessly about failing to conceive any children by the Shah.

"We worked together, my Persian secret policeman and I, in the great hall where the Shah appeared daily to dispense justice, and I noticed one woman whose bright peacock-colored wrappings could be seen through the screen.

" 'It's her,' my friend said one day, gesturing in her direction.

" 'She can hear you,' I remarked, as we mounted a speaking tube behind a piece of molding. 'You're speaking right at the focal point.'

"He shut up, but from that day on, she appeared behind the screen in whatever room we worked in, always distinguishable by the bright full veil of peacock blue, trimmed with a hand's-span width of gold embroidery. I did not dare speak to her, and tried to pretend she wasn't there as best I could.

"One day a tall black eunuch whom I did not know approached me. It was she who summoned me, and trembling I accepted, telling him pointedly to have her not offer me anything to eat or drink. He laughed slyly and I despaired, because the eunuchs hated me. When I was led to her apartment, a table was spread out with tea, the sticky rose-flavored candy the women loved, little cakes. Inwardly I despaired, because to refuse food or drink among the people of the East is a deadly insult. I already knew what power the women of the court had, and hated her, or the eunuch who put me in that predicament.

"She came in, muffled and closed off from my view, covered entirely, even her eyes were concealed by a fine mesh that hung over her veil. We both looked at the table spread out before us, I in my silk mask, she swaddled as tightly as a mummy, and we both laughed. Under the eunuch's bored, suspicious gaze we chatted lightly in French, and she showed herself to be as brainless as a Parisian schoolgirl, but that made no difference. I was charmed, entirely." Then he looked at me with profound sadness and heavily sighed.

"It's all right," I said. "Go on."

"She liked slight of hand, and so I pretended to bend a spoon, made a few marbles appear and disappear. I leaned over to withdraw one from her sleeve, but the eunuch stood up and slid out his enormous curved sword and waved it in between us, signalling that we were to stay a table's length apart.

"I was entranced. The next day I did not see her, and a week later my friend informed me that she was gone from the Golestan, and I implored my friend, where? He told me only that the Khanum had arranged for her to be married to one of her nephews, and as he told me this his lip curled in disgust. The man in question was dissipated, one who thought of nothing but excess and cared neither whether it was man or woman, child or beast. Further, he had caught some filthy disease, and the best French doctors in Tehran could not mitigate it.

" 'Worst,' my Persian friend said, 'my father condones it. The Shah has promised him ten Arabian horses and a chance to race them next year. It's not that the Shah needs his permission, but he likes to keep on everyone's good side.'

"Every day, every night, I bitterly thought about escape, of finding her, of taking her with me back to France. I had been to some of the Shah's other palaces of pleasure on various construction projects, and knew that he had five times as many scattered across the country. She could be in any of those, or already in her new husband's house.

"Some corrupt eunuchs came to me in the night and offered me jewels in exchange for making a series of trap doors and passageways through the basement rooms, to connect the _andarun_ to the outside. That way the ladies could go to the basement and meet lovers smuggled in from the outside, at high profit for the eunuchs. My anger overcame my fear at being caught in this double-dealing, and I agreed. Through their ringleader I discovered that she whom I sought would be briefly in the Golestan the next day, to meet with the Khanum about the upcoming marriage. I was to go to a little-used penthouse garden directly underneath the east tower, and wait there. It was neglected and dusty, and no one liked it because at midday the hot sun beat on it and baked it to clay. Even the fountain had been turned off long ago.

"At high noon I stood in the sharp white sun, thinking that if Nasir caught me, it would mean my death, and perhaps the death of my friend as well. I had seen men in the courtyard after Nasir's men had gotten through torturing them, and they looked far worse than myself, tongues and ears ripped off, eyes put out ... Oh, Christine, you are white. I told you stories of Persia were not for you."

"No," I said. "I want to hear it, till its conclusion."

"The sun bleached everything. It was midsummer, and everyone in the Golestan was asleep, it seemed, everyone but myself. I despaired of seeing her, and thought myself the victim of some trick or bribery. The garden was inset into the side of the building and was enclosed on three sides by the walls of the east tower itself, and on the second story was a porch railing, but not like we see, for this railing went from floor to ceiling. Like everything else in that garden it was broken and neglected, with the slatted wooden rails broken in spots, some large enough that a man could fit through.

"A movement on that upper level caught my eye, and my breath stopped in my chest. There, moving along the walkway, she was. I stood transfixed. She moved over to one of the holes in the railing, looking down at me with her veiled face. Then she called down, 'A trade, Maker of Trap Doors. A sight of my face for yours.'

"Tears stood in my eyes. I was young, and frightened, and she stood so still, like one of the great statues of ruined Persepolis. She took my silence to mean, go first, and so she did, unwrapping her head covering, and then the gauze that covered her face, letting the wide strips fall at her feet.

"She was not beautiful, not to my eyes, but rather an ordinary Persian girl of about sixteen, with fattish cheeks and the thick dark hair they prize so thoroughly. She stood there for a long moment with her dark hair long about her shoulders and entirely unmoving, for there was no wind to stir it. Then, when I made no move, said no word, she wrapped her face up again and slipped slowly away into the shadows cut black and sharp into the wall by the knife of the noonday sun.

"Frozen despite the midday heat, I returned to my rooms, brushing off everyone who tried to speak to me as I blindly made my way through the twisted corridors and vast halls of the Golestan palace. My Persian friend tapped on my door several times, but I lay on my cot and did not answer him, nor did I answer my foremen when they came after me. Finally one of the Khanum's eunuch's came, and I knew with sinking, despairing heart that someone had seen, and that I would be lucky to escape with a whole skin. I could try to throw myself on the mercy of the French embassy, but generally if one had broken one of the local laws, it was fruitless.

"A summons from the Khanum could not be ignored. I bathed, dressed, and greeted the small, round figure entirely covered in _hijab_, so that only her piercing, deep black eyes could be seen. She bade me sit, offered me juice in which a few rose petals floated, and again fear gripped me as I refused, as gracefully as possible. She waved her large hand, more like a paw than a woman's, thick with rings, as if to say, never mind. Then, in a move which horrified me more than anything, she told the eunuch to leave, and without a word, he did. I was alone with the mother of the Shah of Persia.

"We sat facing each other for long moments, without speaking. She lit her hookah and began to pull the sweet, hashish-scented tobacco into her lungs. Then she laughed, a hoarse laugh from down in a throat that sounded sore. 'So, Frenchman,' she said, 'You have this irrepressible curiosity to see women's faces. I will show you one, and you will not forget it.' She then unpinned the long and voluminous wrap which swathed her head, and sat there staring at me, blinking her slightly protruding eyes set in a fat moon face. It was an ordinary Persian woman's face, of late middle-age, with the typical dark moustache and eyebrows that they refuse to pluck or bleach. Then I was convinced that I was about to die, for one cry from her and the eunuchs would cut me to ribbons with their swords. 'Have you satisfied your curiosity?' she said in well-accented French.

" 'Yes,' I answered, and then, because the fear of death was on me and I saw no escape, I remarked, 'Shall I reciprocate the favor?'

" 'It's not necessary,' she said. 'My son has told me all I need to know.' Then she scrunched her eyes into piggish black slits. 'You are useful to him, Frenchman, and that's why I don't have you killed right where you sit. But you have a decision, some priorities to set in order. You are not the only one with secrets here, and not the only one whose secrets ultimately come before me. That little stunt on the rooftop will cost me dearly. My nephew doesn't want her anymore, says she's defiled herself. With what he's stuck his member into, I can't quite believe that, but that's his problem. But when you make things my problem, Frenchman,' and she did not speak, but rather spat the word out, 'then I have to take action.'

" 'Give her to me,' I breathed out. 'If he won't have her, give her to me.'

" 'Never,' she said. 'I have discipline to maintain here. If every woman in the _andarun_ who doesn't like the match I've made for her thought she could get out of it by exposing herself to any passing infidel, how could I run this herd of cats my son calls his harem?' So how do you say it? I will lay some cards out before you. You can pack your miserable belongings and get out of my son's court, and our country tonight. Go to the embassy and cry about your mistreatment, I don't care. They won't help you, because even their ambassadors aren't that stupid, to meddle with one of the women of the _Ummah_. They reserve their attention for the brothels full of Christians and Parsees.'

" 'I'm not going to have you castrated, although it would be doing you a favor. Then you could run in and out of the _andarun_ as often as you liked. The women would like that, I suppose, as they've taken a fancy to you, which I can't understand, seeing as what a miserable specimen you are. Once healed, if you practiced a little _frottage_ on a few of the women here and there, well, I'm tolerant as long as it doesn't interfere with my son's prerogatives. But clipping you would most likely kill you, as scrawny and bloodless as you look, and that would indeed call down the wrath of your diplomats on our heads. So there's one other thing you can do for me, Frenchman, to keep yourself in my good graces and thus in my son's. The little bitch is going to be put to death, as is both my son's right, and her father's. I've decided you will have the honor of carrying it out.' "

He sat back in the carriage then, catching his breath, and his normally pale face was paper-white, the rings under his eyes black as smeared mascara. He put his hand into his mouth again and looked out the window, and a great flood of pity filled me with sympathy and horror. "I think I know where this is going," I said softly.

Ignoring me, he shuddered and went on. "I wanted to stay in Persia. My friend had just told me of a new state building for which I was to receive the sole contract, a new set of courts mounted above a vast warren of prison cells, to house the ever-increasing ranks of the religious and political rebels within the Shah's empire. My Persian friend was to be installed as the chief security officer there, and he and I were to work together, designing the rooms for interrogations, for hearings, for investigations. It was the largest and most extensive project I had been offered so far. Ambition consumed me."

"So you agreed."

"So I agreed. The next Friday was set for the time of the execution. The large public courtyard outside the Golestan was set aside for punishments and executions. After the hands and feet had been carried away in baskets, sand thrown over the blood and the crippled dragged away, too stunned and dazed even to scream any longer, they brought her out. They had given me an ax for beheading her, but I threw it to the ground. Inside my coat sleeve I had a long loop of catgut, a _garotte_ which I had learned to use in Russia, from one of the Indian showmen. I wanted her to die quickly and painlessly, not hacked or mutilated.

"A great crowd of men filled the courtyard, cheering me on, hissing and spitting at her. A few rocks flew until the guards screamed and waved their swords threateningly at the crowd. One stone hit me on the forehead and the wet blood soaked my mask and ran down to my chin. She stood still as a statue, quiet as a dead woman, for she was already dead, even though she still breathed and was warm. They unbound her hair and left her only in a short shift which provided no modesty. I took off my long coat and went to put it over her, even though the guards threatened and cursed me in Farsi. I spat a few curses back at them and then looked at her for a long time. The crowd began to scream, and I glanced up to the nearest tower, where behind a railing a long line of women watched, waiting to see her blood stain the sand.

"She showed no fear. 'I'm sorry,' I kept saying, 'I'm sorry,' but she looked at me calmly and said, 'You don't have to do this.'

" 'They will kill me,' I said.

" 'Then they kill you. At least you will not go to your Isa and his pure mother Maryam with blood on your hands.'

" 'I don't believe in Isa or Maryam,' I said. 'Those are children's tales.'

" 'Then pray for Allah's mercy on your soul.'

" 'Get on with it,' men in the crowd screamed. 'Bend her over first,' others howled. 'A slut like her won't mind.'

" 'I'll make this quick,' I told her. 'You won't feel much.'

"She looked away, tears standing in her eyes. I put my hands around her neck, felt the carotid arteries pulse on either side of her neck, and pressed them until her eyes rolled up in her head, then closed. Propping her up with my knee and one hand, I slipped the garotte around her neck with the other, pulling it tight and true, and it was over in a few moments. She slumped to the ground and some of the men cheered, while others complained that it was quiet, they'd missed it all, and there was no blood. I let her lie where she fell in the steaming sand and walked away.

"The next morning I met my Persian friend after his prayers, and after my morning coffee. We immediately sat down to work on the prison complex as if nothing at all had happened."

The rain had stopped but clouds entirely covered the moon, so the inside of the old carriage was dark, and the wet air made a little fog inside, from the warmth of our bodies. The ruined hulk of the whole Second Empire framed his sad head. He shook silently in his corner of the seat, and although his face was turned away from me, I knew he was crying. It tore through me, lashing me with pity. He is so alone, I thought. I knew him, I knew that he would recover his composure and make some sarcastic remark, ask me if I was satisfied, now that I knew, something about the "insatiable curiosity of women." Then I realized that he had answered me; he had told me who she was, why she died, and how, and now it was up to me to make my answer in return.

He is so ugly, I thought. I can't even touch him. How can I do this? I reached into my purse and stroked the velvet on the box like fur. People can learn to love. I don't love him, but maybe I can learn. Maybe something will happen, a miracle. Maybe I don't have enough faith.

Thoughts and fancies raced through my mind. I'm all he has. Besides, he's old, perhaps he won't want me to do those things, anyway. If he wanted them that much, he would have demanded them already. Perhaps he just wants my companionship, someone to listen to him. How does he bear all these sorrows he must carry, of which he never speaks and probably never will?

I coughed a little, and he turned his silvery tear-tracked face to me. Without speaking, praying that the sliver of ice in my heart would melt, I opened the dark velvet box and slipped the heavy gold band around my finger. Its weight pressed on me and I sagged a little, as the ox staggers under the weight of the yoke on its shoulders.

He stared at me in astonishment. "Do you want to look at this carcass any longer?" he asked, almost stammering over his words.

I shook my head.

"You liked the Bois. Would you like to go back there?"

"I would." I kept thinking, he's going to kiss me now, what will I do then? However, he made no move towards me. After giving instructions to the driver, he drummed his heels light and fast against the bottom of the berlin's seat, and this time I didn't rebuke him. Captured by his gaze, vibrating with his staccato rhythm, I fidgeted and soon tapped my own foot to that compulsive beat. Now that he had me, it seemed, he had no idea what to do next, or what to say. Slowly we crept along the tree-lined boulevard, and the ring burned on my finger like ice.

(_to be continued_...)


	13. Snakes in the Grass

**Snakes in the Grass**

Deep happiness suffuses me when I stay at Philippe and Anki's house, and this visit was no different. That warm tenderness comes not from the rundown sprawling stone building almost 300 years old, nor the hastily-hemmed bright curtains that line windows of wide-open rooms, nor the old striped cat that purrs near the newly-blacked kitchen stove. It's not due to the row of little boots by the back door, stained red from being run around the clay-packed perimeter of the garden. Nor does it come from the worn farmhouse desk on which I write, the soft wood which has seen so many accountings, so many letters, and who knows what sighs and prayers over a flickering candle in the crevice of the night. It's born of the glowing core of Anki and Philippe themselves, two luminous flickers combined into one flame spread through time and space, leaving little brush fires of love in its wake, four so far, little fire-flowers.

"Go turn in if you like," I told my son and his wife after we finished our supper the other night. "Johannes and Genna will help me tidy up the kitchen." The children and I scraped and wiped and dried and swept. "When I was little," I said, "my mother told me that we must always keep the kitchen spic-and-span, or the house-troll would be upset. We didn't want him to leave our house and become a wild troll, you see. So we swept up every crumb, and then we'd leave him a little bowl of milk."

Genna's eyes grew wide. "Was that my grandmother who said that?"

"Silly," Johannes said, "your grandmother's right here."

"It was your great-grandmother."

"Did she ever see the house-troll?" Genna wanted to know.

"If she did, she never told me," I replied, then hit myself across the head inside, what am I doing? Fostering the same blindness that ensnared me? But unlike my Papa, unlike Martine, I leave them a way out. I leave them a way to make up their own minds.

"What happened to the milk?" Johannes asked.

"It was gone the next morning."

"Did you have a cat?" he asked, looking at me hard, hoping to catch me out. I knew where he was going with this.

"We did. We had barn cats who never came into the house, but one day one of the barn cats had a litter of kittens, and my mother brought me out there to look at them. Then she said, go ahead and pick one, but one that's nice, not one that fights or scratches at your hand. Their eyes had just opened and they weren't used to people. My mother made sure I picked the sweetest and gentlest one, and that became our house cat."

"So the house cat could have drunk the milk."

"Yes," I said, smiling at him, "she might well have done that."

"What was her name?" Genna wanted to know. "And where is she now?"

"Our cat? Her name was Minna. She used to chase the little mice that ran around behind the stove, where it was warm, and sometimes she'd even catch one and eat it on the hearth."

"Oh, horrid," said Genna. "Did your Mama chase her away when she did that?"

"Of course not," I said. "Minna was proud of her mice, and if she ate them, then they weren't spoiling our peas or barley. She's long gone, for that was what, almost five decades ago?"

"Now what about my great-grandmama?" she demanded in her insistent, piping voice. "Where is she now?"

"Here, Genna, watch that dish, as it's about to slip. Oh, my mother's name was Emma, and she died, darling, right about when I was your age."

"That's terrible," Johannes said.

"Yes, it was," and as I stacked the last of the dishes, inwardly I went back to those dark winter days, with Mother not even able to sit up by the fire any longer, but in bed all the time now, and her piteous cries one evening that she couldn't see the firelight anymore, the quick decline after that, the rough-planked coffin, the frozen ground and having to wait all those weeks until spring to bury her. Then there were the untilled fields, my father sitting with his head in his hands or absently playing the plaintive violin. The cow cried unmilked unless I took her udders in hand, until I struggled out of the barn with the heavy pail and spilled it all one day, right at Papa's feet, and him sitting unmoving as the white tide lapped over the edges of his wooden clogs. Minna came to lap up the spilled milk, curling her soft grey tail around Papa's unresponsive legs.

Not a story for children.

Johannes could ready himself for bed. Baby Roland's thick dark lashes rested on his round cheeks as he lay in his little cot , but unlike most two-year olds, his sleep would stay steady and unbroken until the sunrise. Thus Larissa and Genna could quietly whisper as they hung up their frocks, as I brushed and braided their hair for the night. They both had long hair, silky raven waves with a sheen of chestnut, a mix of their father's crow-straight and mother's curly black, lightened by some hint of their grandmother, no doubt.

Anki and Philippe were in their own room, voices coming from within, mostly quiet. Occasionally Philippe's would carry and I tried not to listen. Then, as I headed off to my old rope-bed in the little spare room with its shuttered windows open to catch the night breeze, I passed Philippe and Anki's door, left accidentally open. Swiftly I walked by, but not before I caught full sight of Philippe on his knees before her, arms wrapped around her full hips, his head buried in her bosom, her white hand stroking his head, soothing him in the dim room with no lamplight. The soft white moon so recently risen over the summer Flanders fields almost ready to drop their grain, stroked his hair too, making it shine with streaks of silver.

That was a good night, the night I slept under Philippe's low-ceilinged slate-tiled roof, the echo of children's arms around my neck, the goodnight kisses, the prayers, and then the sweet triumph of Anki's late-night visit. She came in dusted with love, a little rumpled and bearing the faint scent of the bed. Oh, Philippe was so happy, she said, she had hardly ever seen him cry, but he cried tonight, Mother de Chagny, and I cried a little with her, because she was with her husband and wouldn't lose any of that time, and they wouldn't be separated, at least not for awhile.

Don't waste it, I told her. Cherish every day, and she knew what I meant.

Then Philippe drove me in the trap the next morning to catch the train back to Brussels. We had the most peculiar conversation as we clopped through the soft morning air that threatened to flare up yellow and hot later in the day. "I may be traveling to Paris when we get back from bathing in De Haan," he said.

"Curious," I replied. "I've just gotten a letter from Raoul's solicitors. The lawyers need to see me about the final disposition of Raoul's estate. What lawyers are in Paris in August, though?"

Philippe's face darkened a little. "The real sharks, I imagine, the ones who don't mind hot waters. What a time to go to that city, but at least you'll have no difficulty finding a hotel. Will you need me there with you, to take care of affairs? I think I can arrange it."

"I don't think it will be necessary. It's probably something to do with the sale of the chateau. Anyway, I'm going as soon as I can, to get it over with. So what takes you to Paris, then?"

"Do you remember Professor Gagnepain from University of Louvain, the one who has gone on several expeditions to Asia Minor to excavate ancient human remains?"

"Of course. Do you remember that dinner party we gave for him, when he gave a lecture at the Lyceum in Brussels? None of the guests got to speak to him afterwards, as you and he played duets for the rest of the evening."

"I have never heard anyone play the violin as he does. Tears were running down my face, and I could scarcely read the music."

"You didn't notice we all came into the parlor to listen to you. That sarabande by Handel, I'll never forget it."

"Mother," he laughed, a little embarrassed, "We didn't even know you were there."

"What of Professor Gagnepain?" I asked.

"He wrote me last week. He's been working at the Paris University Medical School, helping design protocols for the detectives of _la Sûreté_ to more easily identify the victims of criminals by analyzing the skeletal morphology of the remains. He's good friends with Dr. Locard, the one from Lyons who's just set up his own special medical laboratory to help police investigations. Anyway, some years ago, workers in the Paris Opera House were burying some kind of time capsule full of voice recordings in one of the sub-basements, and they found a skeleton in the bowels of the cellars there, in a most peculiar location, although Gagnepain didn't say exactly where. The incompetent bureaucrats immediately moved the skeleton from its location, making no sketches or notes as to its original provenance, and had it sent to the medical school. Then, because one swift decision a decade was all they could manage, the remains languished in a storage facility for all this time, while the Opera officials argued with the medical school over who was going to pay for the forensic examination. Now they want the remains catalogued and identified. It will be like a little symposium, and to meet Dr. Locard will be a great honor, for he's also agreed to come in for the exhumation."

"Why all this excitement about a skeleton?" I asked through a throat gone suddenly thick and dry. "And he wants you to come as well?"

"It's most likely due to that paper I read last year at Louvain, the one on using the thickening of the epiphyseal plates to determine skeletal evidences of aging." Philippe looked like a great elongated boy who's found a treasure, full of the same excitement. "Gagnepain thinks our mystery skeleton was left to sit for so long because no one in the French government wanted to stir up passions again about the Commune, especially with so much agitation in Paris now from that band, what do they call themselves? Marxists, something like that, the ones who've been causing no end of trouble in Imperial Russia. They've turned the Paris Communards into their idols. If it's really a dead Communard, they'll make no end of political hay over it and it will be in all the newspapers. But of course, if it's a dead soldier from that war of almost fifty years ago, no one will be interested, and we'll be left to study it in peace. My guess, even without seeing a thing, is that it's an ordinary victim of an ordinary crime. But that's what we're meeting in Paris to determine."

"And lay the poor soul to rest, I hope," I whispered.

"Of course, Mother," he said kindly, noticing my reaction for the first time. "Don't worry. The Third Republic may be content to put it in a museum as a display piece, or dump it into an unconsecrated grave, but Gagnepain and I won't allow that. We'll lay it to rest."

I didn't stop trembling until the rickety old train rattled its way over the Kleine Nete river, its shallow, slow-moving waters yellowing in the swiftly warming day.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooo

After leaving the devastated palace whose disgraced monarch had fled to prison and obscurity in England, Erik and I rode in the squeaky old carriage to the Bois des Boulogne, the great forested park on the western outskirts of Paris. It began to rain in earnest, and the cabman stopped briefly to put on his black oilskin coat and hat. He shook his head incredulously when Erik directed him to go on, yes, we were going to the Bois in the rain.

The splattering noise comforted me, those thousand little footprints of rain walking over the berlin's roof. Erik's ring was thick and just a little too big, so it forced the last three fingers of my left hand apart from each other. The inside of the carriage smelled like damp moldy leather, and a little rain leaked in on my side, a few solitary drips isolated from the rest of the downpour by the dusty, misty glass.

A wind came up, and as we turned onto the Rue des Tribunes the rain almost stopped, leaving only a vague mist. In the rising fog the forest itself seemed entirely isolated. It was easy to believe that Erik, the driver, and I were the only people left in Paris. The quiet between us had a reassuring quality. It played over me for awhile, relaxing me, until I said, "Thank you for your story, of the Persian girl. I think I understand a little better what your _Don Juan Triumphant_ is about."

"I doubt it," he said, but without venom.

"So what shall we do?" I finally asked, waving my left hand before him. "Where shall we live?"

Nervously he twisted the top of his walking stick. "I must finish my opera completely, and then I must go to my bank and make a great withdrawal." He then started in on a long speech which impressed me, which I will never forget, due to the calm and rational tones in which he delivered it. He repeated how he loved me, he never tired of saying it, he was willing to die for me, he would give me everything. Two nights hence, after the Masked Ball, our betrothal would become real. Afterwards, I would live with Mama Valerius in the apartment until he could secure proper lodgings for us in the world above, where he wanted to reside with me, his wife, at his side. I would sing _Don Juan Triumphant_ when my voice was sufficiently mature, and would become the greatest diva Paris, or the world, had ever seen, for there was no reason for us to remain in Paris if we did not wish. If he did not wish, that is.

No longer did he want me to sing only for him; instead, he wanted me out in the world with him at his side. He would be my maestro, my impresario, my teacher, my lover. Then he went on about how I was to be with him forever and exclusively, "Like a rare jewel in a case of velvet," were the words he used.

I was young. Is that an excuse, that I could believe that a man could want to keep me entirely to himself, to be seen by no one else, and to take once again to the stage, adored by all the world? It was as much a contradiction as believing that he could hunger for my hair, barely restrain his hands from moving through it like trout through the stream, and yet not make the demands of the flesh that husbands made, even old ones. Something flashed in me, a warning that these two extremes couldn't both be satisfied within the same marriage, but I pushed it down.

Surely I had seen all that he had done underground, he went on. What didn't I think he could do? All that accomplishment was to be nothing in comparison to what he could do with me at his side. As he talked, his eyes glimmered fiercely in time to his spastic movements. No husband would be as devoted as he; none as faithful; none as dedicated to my every comfort and wish, so long as I remained faithful to him. So that foolish girl who thought that it was possible to have a whole bag of sweets and dinner at the same time assented with her lips to what she had already shown with her gesture, the gesture of putting his thick and unwieldy ring upon her finger.

He thrust one arm out dramatically and whispered, "The city is yours, I put the whole city at your feet." All the kingdoms of the world lay before me, and I saw myself a decade hence, robed in brocades, swathed in diamonds, bowing from Berlin to London before weeping audiences. No more for me the fatigue of long rehearsals, of bit parts and breech roles, no more the contempt of the leading lady. Some understudy would cater to me, so his extravagant gesture seemed to promise.

As a woman who's shepherded children, negotiated with tradesmen, took on Raoul's family and won, steered the ship of marriage through rocks and shoals, listened to my share of lies and deceits and more than enough self-deception, today I would know the exaggerated absurdity of Erik's words. But not then. I was young then, so young, and believed that if a man offered something with convincing masculine enthusiasm, that he had it in his hand to deliver. Or perhaps then I saw more clearly than I do today, blurred as my vision is now with doubt and timidity. Perhaps we could have taken Paris on the strength of Erik's will alone.

I'll never know.

We came to the vast and deserted Hippodrome Longchamps, the convoluted race track that stretched between the Seine River and the edge of the forest. A solitary carriage sat at its edge, its driver like ours swathed in oilskin against the mild drizzle, and some distance from the carriage stood a figure, a man, moving about, pacing as if looking for someone, waiting for something. Our carriage pulled up alongside the stationary one, and the two drivers exchanged some friendly words. A little moon peeked through the mist, and I opened my window and leaned my head out to get a better look at the pacing man. Erik shifted and muttered with impatience, but I shushed, him, saying, "I want some fresh air, it's humid and stuffy inside this coach." Leaning my head out further, I took in deep draughts of the cool moisture rising from the damp ground.

"Pull your head back in here," Erik protested. "You'll catch the catarrh in your throat."

"Ridiculous," I said. "It's dry air that makes my throat sore, not moist." Then I fixed my gaze on the strolling, strangely familiar figure. He walked under the only nearby gas light for a moment, and my heart gave a huge leap, clattering against my ribs like a runaway train. I would have called his name, but my tongue seemed to swell in my mouth, blocking any air and sound. It couldn't be, yet it was. A moonlit aureole of fair hair bordered his head from behind, while the gas light showed me the long slender nose, the wide carved jawline, the small silvery flake of moustache. He wore neither overcoat nor hat and must have been cold, for he rubbed his hands and circled back and forth. Suddenly he came out of his reverie and stared intently at our carriage still parked next to his.

Having exchanged pleasantries, our driver jerked to a start. The movement startled us both into action at the same time. "Christine!" Raoul called out, breaking into a run towards our carriage. "Wait! Stop!" I leaned out the window as far as my shoulders would allow, but fear strangled the cry in my throat before it could emerge. A loud roar came from behind. Erik had used the full force of his voice to command the driver to leave at once, and that fulsome noise could have filled double the auditorium of the Garnier Opera, had he so chosen. Pain split my ears from his fierce call, and then he jerked me back into the cabin so that I fell hard against the back of the seat, shaking my head against the daze.

Through my open window I could hear Raoul's cries fade behind the clattering hooves. The cabman had urged his horses on, and we sped out of sight as fast as a rattletrap berlin pulled by two worn old horses could go. The lonely figure dashing behind, trying vainly to keep up with a team of horses, soon vanished into the night.

Erik leaned over me and shut my window with such vehemence, I feared it would break and scatter glass all throughout. His skewed false nose made his face look cruelly deformed and distorted, his moustache like a caterpillar climbing crookedly up his face. He groped his face as if blind, then cursed when he realized that the whole contrivance was about to fall off. Sweat, or perhaps a fresh start of tears, streaked the greasepaint concealing the unevenness of his skin, and the black rings around his eyes stood out starkly. Shocked and terrified at what he would do, I cur1ed in the corner of the cabin and peeked out at him occasionally, not wanting to be ambushed from behind by a blow or something worse, but not wanting to stare at him either.

Then I did stare. He drew from his pocket a little pot of what looked like salve, but was apparently some kind of spirit gum, which he applied anew to his nose. He tried several times but it wouldn't stay, so he erupted into a volley of fresh curses. Finally he managed it to his satisfaction, but glared at me fiercely as I fixed my glance on the cracked upholstery, sneaking an occasional glimpse of his furious, glowering form. He snarled at the driver to take us back into Paris, back to the Opera.

Raoul, whom I never thought I would see again, was at the park behind the race track. Why? I played over in my mind the sight of him, fair and wide-shouldered, just pacing back and forth opposite the road from from his carriage. So many times had I envisioned him walking up the gangplank of a warship, a column of sailors behind him in their jaunty hats, row after row of moustaches, scarves around their necks, and him all in blue. Then in my imagination he sailed over some dim horizon, leaving me as he had when I was seventeen, the day he kissed my hands outside the garden gate of our summer house in Perros. But he wasn't wrapped in furs, keeping watch on some frozen deck of a ship heading for the polar ice cap. He was here, in Paris. He had seen me, called for me, chased after me.

Many a time I have played out the events of that night before the investigating magistrate of my heart. Erik filled the carriage with anger, a cold blue fog that surprised me with its sullen silence. I expected him to lash out at me, but his control over his rage was vast. We turned slowly onto the broad and shining Rue Hausmann while he simmered, saying nothing, and his silence terrified me more than any raging. The rain had started again, a light rain that I couldn't hear inside the carriage, one that left only faint outlines of drops on the wet streets.

"You lied to me," he hissed. "You said he would be sailing, and gone."

"I didn't know exactly when he was to leave. I thought it was soon."

"What do you think he was doing under that lamp, in that lonely part of the Bois? Do you suppose he was simply taking a constitutional, out enjoying the scant moonlight? How stupid you are, Christine, not to understand what a man does in this remote part of the woods late at night?"

"I saw no woman there," I sniffed. Erik's words bored into me with unpleasant accuracy. "He wouldn't do that."

"Man is not a biped, little professor of innocence. Man is a triped, and sometimes the third leg dominates all others."

"What does that say for you, then?"

"It says that I am not a two-faced little hypocrite and liar, saying one thing and doing another. As poor a 'specimen' as I am, to quote that great bitch-mother of Persia, my heart is true. I would hearken to no one else that I happened to spy on the boulevard."

"Not even your Persian girl?"

"Don't speak of her," he snapped. "You have no right to speak of her. Her blood is on Erik's hands, and only Erik has that right. If Erik has lost an occasional battle against the flesh, it was never a defeat suffered under the banner of true love, for never did Erik seduce with false words or actions. Why do you continue to deceive yourself? You know that I see and hear everything that goes on in that great mausoleum we call the Garnier. Often have I seen your sailor boy roaming the corridors with that gross pimp whom he calls brother, the elder looking for just the right combination of garter and hair and crevasse into which the younger de Chagny could pour his pent-up innocence."

"You never saw Raoul with another woman. He came to my dressing room, and mine alone."

"The panderer had your little friend in the dancers' salon almost every week, letting him know in no uncertain terms that any woman would be at his disposal there, save one, the one he had claimed for himself."

"I'm sure he did nothing."

"How do I know what he did behind my watchful eyes?"

"I thought you saw and knew everything."

"If his brother the Comte managed to stir his lust with visions of the ballet corps, how do I know what he did afterwards in the Pigalle? Or in the Bois, for that matter? Flesh can be bought anywhere in Paris for very cheap coin. Your little friend may wear the scapular but he also wears something between his legs that sends men out into the tenebrous night."

Was it true? There was no way Raoul could have come to the Bois that night solely to anticipate me. Erik and I had only decided to detour there on the spur of the moment. Raoul did have the look of a man waiting desperately for someone, or for something to happen. The seventeen-year old boy I knew would not have cruised the Bois close to midnight. But what did I grasp of him now? Almost five long years had passed, during which time he had gone to naval school, ventured on expeditions, pulled into port with other sailors, no doubt lived a man's life. Yes, he seemed to have this passionate devotion to me, following me to Perros, sending me notes, trying to waylay me in the corridors, professing undying love – but was that not what men did when they wanted something? Here I was gone a little over two weeks, and since I was out of sight, was I out of mind as well, only to rekindle his interest by the merest coincidence?

Erik, however, Erik was different. Even when I lay sleeping in his apartments, or defenseless in the bath (for I had long since given up the illusion that a pair of scissors could stop him) he did not reach for me. Oh, he stared – those stares and sighs horrified and pierced me with pity at the same time, but he did not reach, or touch.

He sensed my hesitation and sinuously leaned forward to strike the final blow. "He would have never married you."

I leaned back as if hit. Why else would Raoul have pursued me, if not with marriage in mind? Anger against both men surged up in me, and since Raoul was not there, I had only one outlet for it. "You are horrible," I said, getting louder as I went on. "Nasty and low-minded, thinking the worst of everyone."

"You suspect I am right, or you would not blame me for your doubts. Do you question for a moment that I love you with an entirely faithful love?"

"Do you?" I asked, sarcastically. He had forbidden me to mention the Persian girl, but she hung suspended in my tone.

He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me to him, quite close to his face. I had never been kissed, save on the hands tenderly by Raoul, and as Erik's great skull-like face loomed ever closer, a tiny shocked protest flailed about inside of me, this is not how it is supposed to happen, it can't be this way. But he did not kiss me, only held me up to the brutal wreck of his face, a hulk as tragic as the "coffin of Paris" we had just viewed earlier. Twisted with anguish, his nose had once again started to slip, but he ignored it.

"Never doubt me," he said savagely, "Or I'll ..."

But what he was going to do I never heard, for the carriage pulled to the side of the boulevard and stopped. Erik flung me back into my seat and snarled, "You obviously need a more convincing demonstration, and you can rest assured before the night is over I will provide one." Then he opened his window and called out in a tight, furious voice, "Why do you stop?"

The cabman said coldly, irritated at Erik's tone, "I have to check one of my mares. Her gait's not right."

Erik cursed under his breath, glared at me, and hunkered down in his side of the bench. He hammered his walking stick on the floor of the berlin, an infuriating, irritating noise that made me want to rip the stick away and throw it out the window, but I dared not speak. Then the cab driver came to Erik's side, and knocked lightly on the door. "I need you to hold the lantern for me, monsieur," he said stiffly, eyes searching back and forth between Erik and myself. "One of my mares has a stone, and it looks like it's wedged underneath her shoe. I can put it to rights if you help."

Erik cast wild exasperated looks at the driver, interspersed with sending daggered expressions to me.

The cabman bristled. Big and broad, he pushed his substantial stomach through the open carriage door with a crackle of oilskin. "Perhaps, monsieur, you would like half your fare back. You and your lovely companion can catch another cab back to the Opera. I'll even throw in my umbrella for the mademoiselle. It's only two kilometers or so. But I hope you understand, I'll not lame a horse for a lover's quarrel."

Erik collected himself and said to the cab driver, "Give me your lantern, and I'll hold it." Shooting one last resentful scowl in my direction, he flung himself from the berlin, almost knocking the big man over. The afflicted mare was hitched to the right side of the carriage, so I scooted over to Erik's side and opened his window a crack, peeking out to see the two of them better. Erik held the lantern and also the mare's reins as he shushed her gently, reminding me of how gently he touched and handled the great Andalusian, Cesar. The mare's warm breath steamed around him and they seemed to calm each other. The cab driver muttered something, apparently the stone had not only wedged itself in, but loosened the shoe a bit as well. He could fix it, but it would take a bit of time.

An idea formed in my mind, inchoate at first, then more solid. Pulling my stationery kit from my purse, I hastily scribbled a note and addressed it to Raoul de Chagny. The cab driver and Erik talked in low tones, the cab driver softening as Erik no doubt promised him a generous tip to oil over the earlier tension. I had finished addressing the envelope when I realized I had no stamp, and even if I had one, there was no way to get it to a postal box without Erik noticing. Frustrated tears sprang to my eyes, and then I jumped with fright, as footsteps clattered near my open carriage window and a big shaggy head poked inside.

It wasn't Erik at the window, but instead the cabman carrying a metal box, hands covered with road mud. I looked out the other window where Erik still stood at the horse's head, almost leaning up against it, his eyes closed. The big black animal seemed to give him some security, some comfort that he could not get from me. The cabman whispered quickly, "Are you all right, Mam'selle?"

An inspiration spurred me on. I handed him the letter and said with quiet haste, "Take this. Don't let him see." He grabbed it with his muck-smeared paw and shoved it into the pocket of his oilskin, then moved smoothly on. Erik soon joined me in the carriage, and because the traffic was so light, we shortly found ourselves once again at the Rue Scribe side of the Garnier Palace.

Erik said nothing to me even when we came to the great iron gate. This time, when he thrust the key into my grasp, I was able to open it on the first try. In his drawing room he hung up our coats on hooks, and then rounded on me with redoubled fury. All the rage and jealousy he had suppressed during our return poured out of him pungent and boiling. What exactly had I let Raoul do to me when we knew each other in those Perros summers, he demanded to know.

"Do you still love him?" he hissed under his breath, then gradually getting louder and more impassioned. "Of course you do, what woman can resist a fair face and skin tender for the caressing, blue eyes as beautiful as yours, like lakes to drown in, eyes unrimmed with the hollow of the grave? I know you don't love Erik. Erik has accepted that, but Erik will not tolerate deceit," and fear speared through me, that he had seen me pass the letter to the cabman. "Tell me what else he did, I know there has to be more. And while your father sat right there, how could you, Christine? But now you must forget him. You're mine now, oh not completely, not entirely yet, but almost mine, this close."

Now that there was no one to hear, our quarrel blazed up again loud and fierce. He knew so much about whores, I retorted, how had he come by that knowledge? His normally pale skin went red with rage, and he pushed me up against the stone wall, howling that if he ever caught me deceiving him, ever, he would drag me to the roof of the Opera, swing me around by my hair and throw me off, then jump from that precipice himself, because he had no life without me, and would not live in a world where I was faithless, or where I didn't exist at all.

I struggled against his restraint, so once again he pushed his stiff hand up high under my breastbone, so hard that even the corset bent with the force. When I tried to squirm away from him, he drove in a swift unsparing blow. The room went black, the air left my lungs, and horror upon horror, I could not take a breath. It was as if that large muscle inside my body, upon which I depended for life, for voice, for air, hung flabby and useless. Down I went upon my knees, in terror that death had shoved itself into my ribs. Then that bruised and paralyzed muscle came back to life, and I inhaled a great whoop of air that tore my lungs and brought tears to my eyes, then slumped to the floor sobbing.

He pulled me up to a sitting position, crying himself now. The gutta-percha nose hung by a string of adhesive, so he ripped it off and flung it onto the dining table.

"Kill me," I screamed. "Get your catgut, or whatever it is. Go ahead, kill me as you did her."

His shocked face opened like a bivalve, revealing the horrid clammy softness inside. He begged my forgiveness, he couldn't stand himself, when Erik got that way it was horrible, speaking in that odd way he had of referring to himself as though someone else were in the room. He would kill himself that very night, and I would be free of him forever. He tried to wrest the ring off my finger, saying that he would swallow it and then throw himself off the roof of the Opera, and I fought him, not letting him have it, fearing that if he removed it (and it was so loose) that he would indeed put an end to himself, and shrieking that I could not bear to have his suicide on my head.

"I'll show you," he whispered hoarsely. "When there's a snake in the grass, you reach for a hoe and chop off its head. I'll remove the serpent from our Eden, Christine, and then it will be up to you to do your part, and remove yours."

Up he leapt. He seized my arm and dragged me towards the tapestry behind which he concealed his room full of automata. Yanking so hard on the wall hanging that its frame broke free and fell to the floor, he raved, "It is all my fault! I know why you doubted me, I am so stupid, I have the brains of a child. This should have been obvious to me from the start. Of course you hung out the window of the cab for that boy. What kind of example have I shown you? Erik will remedy it. Erik will show you that you have nothing to fear, that Erik really will have no other women before you."

He could not even wait until the door swung open on its counterweight, but had to force himself in as quickly as he could, hauling me along behind him. The gaslights had been turned on, and harsh white light sharply outlined the silvery wiry insides of his creations, all disassembled on table tops and benches. Stumbling with blind emotion, he went over to one of the benches, where he cut sheets of foam-pink rubber into skin. A small glittery-sharp sculpting knife rested there, and he swiftly grabbed it. I cried out in fear – was he going to cut me?

Instead, he flew over to the sheet-covered form of the Persian girl. She fell to the ground as he ripped the sheet off her with dreadful force. Pulling her limpid figure up by the hair, he turned to me and screamed, "No woman stands between you and Erik! Forgive me, forgive me for keeping her, I didn't know the effect she would have on you, that of course you could not live with another woman, even if only an image, a pale simulacrum. You were not faithless, I made you that way." Then, to my horror, he gouged a deep circular cut around the automaton's face, starting at the forehead, slicing around the chin, and ending up back at the crown where the black hair emerged. I almost expected to see blood seep through that olive slit. A ripping sound, and he peeled off the very rubber of her face in a single gesture. A few wires refused to come free, so he sliced them effortlessly with his blade so sharp it cut through metal. What was left was a horrible silver skull-face with two staring ivory eyes that watched him accusingly, as the once-living girl had stared at him under the hot plaza sun so long ago.

Roaring and sobbing, he held her detached face up before him like a grim, horrible mask. "Do you see this, Christine? This is what she means to me. Now will you trust Erik? Now will you believe me?" and he sliced the rubber face to ribbons before my eyes.

He took a step towards me, still holding the knife and a few shreds of what had been the image of a human face, but I could bear no more. I picked up my skirts and fled that room as fast as I could, hearing him cry my name behind me. Into my room I charged, slamming the door, locking it but knowing he could enter anytime he wanted. All I could think of was my own face under that knife. Terrified, irrational as a child, I dived under the tall Louis-Philippe bed.

Erik tapped on my door, but unmoving I cowered in that hiding place which provided no concealment at all. The lock clicked as he opened my door with one of his keys. Into the rug I hid my face, feeling a little breath of wind as the door swung open. He stood staring in the doorway, but didn't come in. "Please," he whispered hoarsely. "Please."

I didn't want him in my room, and didn't want to leave the ephemeral shelter of the bed, and so covered my face, hoping he would go away. His knees scraped the carpet as he sagged down, whimpering pathetically for me to come out, Christine, I've put the knife away, please forgive me, please.

From the vantage point of years I have wondered, what if at that point I had taken him in my arms to comfort him? All this life I have built, that Raoul and I built over the decades, would have been swept away like a dream. What would have replaced it is unimaginable to me, for how can one anticipate a life one has never had? But as things stood, fixed and unchangeable in the cold marble of time, I waited for a long time while his softly-moaned entreaties and apologies gradually quieted down, then stopped. Presently I crawled out from under that bed, brushed the dust from my dress, and stepped over Erik half-lying down, half-bowed, face in hands, silently shaking.

I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine from an already-open bottle. Sensing him come up behind me, I braced and readied myself for death. But when no blow came, I asked him if he wanted one too.

"Don't bother drinking that, as it's a spoiled bottle that's just for cooking. Here, let me open another."

Sighing, I put my glass down. What Erik considered unfit for consumption, three-quarters of Paris would have swallowed without a thought. If a bottle was open for half a day, into the sauce it went.

He rummaged in a closet where it was always cave-temperature, where the fire did not reach. "Here's a fine Tokaji, a sweeter one this time. We haven't had one since you first ... visited me." He uncorked the bottle and set it on the marble counter top. Seeing my impatient glance, he said, "It has to breathe first."

"No, it doesn't. Please pour me some now. You can let yours breathe all it wants."

Looking hurt, he poured out a glass for me and sat at the small kitchen work table, arms crossed, his face unashamedly streaked with drying tears.

"Please tell me everything that passed between you and that sailor," he begged. "Everything, Erik wants to know everything. Every caress, every love letter, every conversation."

Writing that note to Raoul suddenly seemed terribly foolish. So we sat in that tiny kitchen, where Erik loomed over me like a vulture pecking at the corpse, pecking, insisting, asking the same question repeatedly in different forms, where was it exactly we had stayed in Perros as children, what was the name of his aunt, were we alone together when exploring the beach grottoes or climbing on the rosy round rocks, did he try to kiss me, did he touch me. On and on we went for hours, and not because there was so much to tell that passed between Raoul and I, but because Erik wanted everything repeated, examined from every angle, analyzed and scryed and picked over, until fatigue and the wine rasped at my temples like a saw on wet wood. I got up to move to the drawing room and he followed me like a nagging child, demanding to know what Raoul had said in every note he had ever written me.

"You wrote him, telling him you were going to Perros, didn't you?" he asked again and again, until finally in tearing frustration I admitted that I had.

"How do you know these things?" I sobbed at one point, for as far-reaching as Erik's silken web might have been woven through the Opera, I had no illusions that he could tweak the Paris postal service itself.

"Never mind that," he said. "Just know that trying to deceive Erik is a fatal error on your part."

Now that I am Erik's age, I laugh at my childishness. Many of the things I thought Erik knew, he really didn't. I too over the years have learned to make guesses, throw them out like clay pigeons, and watch to see if they fall with a thunk to the grass below, or explode in a hundred fragments when the shot hits its mark. Erik had watched me for months behind a screen of glass, locked in an _andarun_ of his own making, honing his powers of observation to knife-sharpness. How many times had he watched me read a letter, arrange the flowers that on some evenings filled the room, unhook my corset and put on a robe, lift my feet so they hung over the edge of the settee? He knew my sighs, every lift of the brow or roll of the eye. He knew when I was lying, even before I did.

So I told him. He acted as if he knew most of it, and his sad, pathetic aspect changed. He put on a wise old monkey face that said, I know far more about him than you do. "Let me tell you, for instance, about the fateful conversation that made your beloved little friend a _habitue_ of our temple of pleasures. It was shortly after you had signed your contract, but before I worked my magic on your frozen instrument of a voice. Comte de Chagny brought his younger brother with him one night, and took him to the dancer's salon after a production of _Don Giovanni_. You understudied that week for Maria Contelli, do you remember?"

"The murdered singer, how could I forget? It was a dreadful way to get a part."

"More dreadful was how she met her end, as punishment for deceitful straying from her husband. Mark it well, Christine. But back to the saga of the de Chagnys. There the older brother introduced his young charge to the illustrious Sorelli, she whose long dark eyes and white arms are worthy of Hera, but is stupid as a calf being led to the slaughter, after the farmer has hit it square between the eyes with an iron mallet. She flirted with that blond young man, untying the ribbon of her shoe and running it around his face and shoulders, and the harder he blushed, the deeper she laughed, and the closer to him she leaned, until it became clear that the Comte found it no longer amusing.

"But so prettily she talked to him, pointing out one dancer after another, saying, which do you prefer, Monsieur le Vicomte, I can introduce you to any of them, but your friend sat still as a block of wood. Sorelli and the Comte drank champagne, but the Vicomte sat clutching the little scapular he wore as if it were a talisman, hoping it would protect him from the wickedness fulminating all around him. Frustrated at the Vicomte's lack of interest, Sorelli made a comment, one that I hope the Comte in private came to make her regret, for she leaned over to Philippe de Chagny and whispered loud enough for the Vicomte to hear, 'Perhaps the girls are not to his taste, perhaps he might like to meet a boy?' "

"That's a horrible suggestion," I interrupted.

"You are very young," he said. "In time you will come to understand that lack of desire is not virtue."

"Besides, how do you know all this?" I demanded.

"I already told you that every wall in this great whitened sepulcher belongs to me."

Realization spread through me like icy rain down a gargoyle's throat. "You can listen in on all the rooms, not just mine. The salons, the lounges, the managers' offices ... Just like in the Golestan palace. You can hear everywhere."

"Congratulations. You have more brains than La Sorelli, although that's not exactly a stellar accomplishment."

"Erik, tell me, please. If this opera house is truly yours, then I beg you, as my former angel of music in whom I believed, tell me the truth. Since I have been here with you, has Raoul de Chagny come looking for me, or inquired about me?"

"Not at all," he said offhandedly, as if it was of no importance to him. "You expected him to? I can assure you that you were not the one he was waiting for tonight in the park. But as I was saying, the Vicomte sprang to his feet and charged directly for the door. Sorelli and the Comte looked at each other for a moment, and then the older man headed out after his brother. It was from that point on that de Chagny brought his brother with him to practically every Friday performance, and an occasional Wednesday one as well. He feared he'd raised _un gai_, and wanted desperately for some scrap of evidence otherwise. That may well be why the juvenile de Chagny has pursued you so assiduously, Christine, to prove to himself what his brother has long suspected, and what common observation has shown to often be the case."

"Hideous," I said, trying to conceal the welter of confusion that rose in my breast, not knowing which I found worse, Erik's insinuations or the possibility they might be true.

"He was weak like _un gai_ in Perros," Erik went on. "I did nothing to him, threatened him in no way. In the church he laid hands on me, attempting to rip off my cloak, and then he fainted at the sight of Erik like a little schoolgirl when a caterpillar in the springtime falls onto her hair from the tree above. Even you did not faint, Christine, when you saw me, the day you became Erik's forever, because you unmasked Erik's face."

Seeing me sit stone-faced, blank on the outside but churning inside with outrage, disappointment, disgust all at once, he pressed his advantage a little too far. "One evening during intermission, when you had once again refused to answer one of his begging letters, he cried in his brother's arms. Oh, I know you did not answer them, because the hallways here are mine, and he loudly complained about that whenever he got the chance, how heartless you were for refusing to see him, or even send him a token or acknowledgment. Personally, I think it shows your good taste, and gives independent proof of your devotion to your art, and to your concern for me. In that brotherly embrace, the Vicomte did not see the expression on the Comte's face, but I did, and it was one of relief and disappointment all swirled together like vanilla and chocolate cream when the pastry chef marbles them together but does not blend them. Relief that it was a woman his younger brother sought, and disappointment at his so-ready tears."

"If tears are a mark of inversion, what does that say about you?" At once I clapped my hands over my mouth, weak with terror at the possible consequences of that bird flying from the nest, never to be recalled.

A terrible silence followed. The dead weight of soundless air was lifted only when the Empire-style clock on the mantelpiece began to chime five. We had talked and argued all night. My head throbbed, my foul tongue clotted my mouth with sourness from the too-sweet wine, and my limbs hung limp with exhaustion. He rose without speaking, his ravaged corrugated face an expressionless mask. I thought he would rage or even hit me for making such a suggestion, but he did neither. Instead, he stalked off silently towards his work room where the slashed remains of the Persian girl lay in a heap on the floor. The door swung silently shut, leaving me alone in the sudden vacuum of rooms where he was not.

I tried to sleep curled up on the drawing room settee, but as soon as I closed my eyes, another stab of fear went through me. What was he doing in there? He stayed there for hours, but I had no way to tell, as the mantelpiece clock had run down and I could not find the key to rewind it. Although I periodically rose and rapped on the door, he gave no answer. For all I knew, he had another unseen exit from that room as well, and could have left me here while he traveled about anywhere. I already knew there was another hidden door in my own room, although I had never been able to open it.

My fingers flew over the latching mechanism for his front door, but I didn't know what odd sequence of movements he used to open it. So I went from the front door, where I vainly tried to make it spring openly as easily as it did for him, to his workroom door, where my dispirited poundings and shouts grew fainter, and then to my own room, and back again, beating against the bars of my cage with hysterical fluttery chirpings. He had left me here to die. I would be buried alive after all.

So I went on, back and forth, until hunger drove me into the kitchen. There was little in the larder except some dried cheese and a few hard biscuits, as he had neither gone out marketing nor cooked that day. I soaked the tough biscuits in a little cooking wine and ate the remains of the cheese, trying to choke them both down with my terror. I almost wished he would come out and pull my hair or beat me, anything except this cold devastating silence that screamed his absence, where the walls closed in on me, where the awareness of layers of earth and steel above me threatened to crush me with with anxiety.

A sudden noise startled me from a long leaden sleep in my clothes, half-sitting in a chair in front of the fire. The door to his workroom was open now, and I wrinkled my nose at the sharp peculiar smell that wafted through the opening, an odd chemical mix both bitter and burning at the same time. Shaking off the sleep, I crept to the door, afraid to see him, more afraid not to. I hung at the entrance to the room where he crouched at a bench, hunched over a pile of wires and colored paper cylinders as he twisted wires together.

"Christine!" he said when he saw me, and ran towards the door where I stood. I backed out and he swiftly activated the door to swing shut behind him. My sleep-stunned head swam and I shook it, but it wouldn't clear. His clothing smelled of the same burning witchery as the room where he had shut himself for so many hours, and his hands were stained with black powder.

He looked at me coldly, but not unkindly. "Pack your bag, Christine, with whatever you want to take. I will send for a carriage and have you delivered to Mme. Valerius's apartment."

"What?"

"Today I prepare my costume for the Bal Masque, and you obtain yours."

"You're letting me go," I said, at once alert and anxious. What new twist had Erik devised now?

"I will be at the Bal Masque at midnight, and no one there will forget my presence. If you are there, if you see me, do not approach me or act as if you know me in any way."

"How would I know you anyway, if you're masked?"

He laughed from his chest, full of sarcasm and bitterness. "Oh, you will know me, Christine, for I will give you a hint. Of everyone there, I will be the only man who dares to come unmasked. The rest you may figure out for yourself."

"You want me to come to this masque, but I have no costume."

He handed me a piece of paper on which was scrawled an address, in his large but almost unreadable hand. "She will have costumes."

"At this short a notice? No one can find a costume to rent in Paris so close to the beginning of Lent. How is that possible?"

"She will have one for you, I can assure you. Pick one, tell her your name, and she will send the bill to me. I will come for you in your dressing room tonight after I have made my appearance. If you are there, I will bring you back here, and our betrothal will be complete, and you will be mine in every aspect."

I said nothing, so he continued. "And if you are not there, oh, if you have decided to do something foolish like find the Vicomte, or run away, or show yourself fickle and capricious like every other woman on this earth, then you will see something spectacular, something beyond anything you have ever experienced. Your poor miserable Erik will fall like a star, fall blazing like Lucifer straight into the arms of the hag you Scandinavians name Hel, because life without you would indeed be a hell, a hell on earth, and if one has to choose between hell on earth, and the flames that never die, then one might simply bypass the miseries of earth and get right down to the business of serious suffering itself. In other words, Christine, if you do not return to me, there may very well be no Erik to return to, and a great tear in the fabric of Parisian humanity besides. Further, if I see you with that brat of an aristocrat, just remember that when I find snakes in my domain, two deceitful snakes, actually, I will crush them under my heel and then make an end to myself, because no torment conceived for me by the malignant mercy of God could equal that sight."

He said the last without rancor, almost calmly, as if it was something he had considered long ago, and was only now ready to put into practice. "He was supposed to have left the country by now," I prevaricated, desperate to calm him and turn his thoughts aside. Guilt pricked at me for planning a rendezvous I didn't even know that I could keep. The cab man had been genial and kind, but just as well could have opened the note, laughed at its contents, and threw it down with the other rubbish that blew into the corners and crevices of the Parisian streets. Continuing the farce, I went on, "He will no doubt leave very soon, probably within the week. You know his ship. Make inquiries if you like."

"That will be easy to check," he said. "The manifests are all on record and if the departure is indeed soon, it will have been filed with the Paris harbor master by this time."

"So you see? There is nothing to worry about."

"And likewise nothing for you to worry about, if you stay true to me." Then he shivered, overcome by some deep emotion. "Christine, please come back to me tonight," he sighed. A few tears leaked from his black-sunk eyes, but this time, most unexpectedly, he turned away as if ashamed I might see them. Before, Erik cried shamelessly before me, or sobbed without restraint. His tears of the past had lacerated me, but the pathetic attempt to hide them battered through my resolve.

Did I not say earlier that the heart can thrum with pity as well as desire? I had no urge to kiss him, or take his hands rapturously in mine, or press him to my breast. But there was no name for the deep heartful emotion which seared through me, not then. Now I would recognize it as the sword which pierces a mother's breast when her child falls from a tree, and wailing clutches his broken arm, or when she sees a soldier stumping along on a wooden leg, wincing with pain, or catches a glimpse of a little shrouded corpse sliding into an unmarked grave and thinks, that could have been my child.

I wish I could tell the girl who was myself that pity alone cannot make a marriage. Oh, I knew desire then, even if I could not name it - the hastening pace of the heart when a trim, black-moustached soldier eyed me appreciatively on the street, or waking from an exciting, tangled dream all warm limbs and longing, or throbbing with the stage passions stirred by the plump, grizzled tenor Fonta with his deep laughing eyes and hot grip. But back then it was all unfocused, an arrow loosed upon no target. It had descended, free-floating, on Erik in those moments before I took off his mask, and then had vanished in the shouts and blows and terror. Now I was left with this great burdensome love, this prey laid at my feet the way Minna brought my mother mice, laying them before her as if to say, praise me, love me, my goddess of the hearth, I worship you. That was the great love Erik dropped at my feet, bleeding like a heart ripped from the body of prey run down in the hunt. In those vain naive days I had no idea that to lift up that burdensome offering and claim it for my own required desire as well as sympathy.

So he hid and wiped his tears, walking me to the iron door that led to the Rue Scribe, and as I opened it to slip through, I turned to him and said quietly, "I will come back." And he cried a little again, turning away so I would not see.

(_continued..._)


	14. Masque de Mal

_**Masque de Mal**_

My own home, my echo-filled home, resonates with a vast and shadowed emptiness in these light-breezed nights. Yesterday evening I returned from Grobbendonk. Alone I sat in our bedroom, enveloped in the Brussels summer evening, and looked for a long time at that big high bed. In this warm season we use the curtains made of lawn, the ones with a faint leaf pattern traced through them, woven into the fine gauzy cotton. Every week the maid changes the sheets, even though the bed remains untouched, virtually un-slept in.

Until last night.

The bed where Isabeau and Louvel were conceived, and later born. The bed in which Raoul died. Into it I crept, trembling, hoping I wouldn't break into tears, but I didn't. His side, the side where a big man used to lie, sank slightly more than the other. My hand caressed the place where his head would have been, and my feet ran over the spot where his were not. I had to stretch to find that empty space, for he had been tall, not so tall as Erik, but then very few were that tall. However, Raoul had been tall just the same, full shouldered and deep-chested, in later years his sloping full belly rich with warmth and laughter.

When my back would ache he pulled me towards him, pressing the convex of his stomach into the concave of my spine, and one by one the spastic muscles would soften and loosen under his gentle heat. Now, when I ache, I don't call for aspirin powder or hot water. Once I ran from the pain of his absence, now I embrace it both in heart and body. I want the spaces where he is not, whether they be between my legs or in the hollow of my spine, in our bed or in front of the fire, to grow and merge into one gigantic emptiness so swollen, so large that it will pass over a tiny prey such as myself, move on, and lose its power to hurt me.

What a sorrowful thing, to burn with desire for the dead. The priests tell us they are beyond desire, but I do not believe it. When our Lord was asked to whom the woman with two husbands would belong in heaven, He dodged the question. I've done my share of business with clever merchants, and the unscrupulous fish seller never answers when the housewife wants to know just precisely when that slimy-eyed fish was caught. Christ's answer was like that.

Long ago Erik said to me, "Lack of desire is not virtue," and I do not see the hypothetical desireless state of the dead as a sign of their supreme virtue, either. It is one thing to lose one's appetite for love through illness or accident, as so many women do after birth, or men with age. But to live without desire as part and parcel of the heavenly state I cannot countenance, for my desire for Raoul is as much of the innermost core of my being as Erik's desire was for me. So to whom then should I belong? Raoul, or Erik, or neither? Not all widows remain so the rest of their lives. More chapters of my life remain to be written.

The condition of heaven is supposed to be one of complete and unconditional happiness for all, yet when one loves another who cannot return it, someone has to lose. Or perhaps that's the nature of seeing only through the darkened glass, seeing obscurely through the veil of life laid over the bones of the soul, the sight that needs faith for reassurance that all will be well.

A haunting American song Louvel taught me comes to mind, an English ballad transplanted to the Americas. In his beautiful lyric baritone, clear and buttery-rich from the chest, he sang of a woman who loves a man, a man who marries her but does not love her, and when he dies, she will not mourn or weep on his grave. She longs for heaven but for her, her only heaven is his love. Can she hope to find it there? Yet in my mind I doubt, and hear Erik's words instead of Louvel's,

_Or in some celestial court_

_Will our sorrows repeated be?_

_Will I still be nothing to her_

_Though she was the world to me?_

So when pressed, our Lord said that in heaven none of the dead would be given to each other, for there is no marriage in heaven. That I do not believe either, even though I do not know how the conundrum of desire, where heaven for one is hell for another, will ever be solved.

All I know is that in my loneliness I pressed my face into Raoul's pillow, but his scent was all gone, for the pillows had been aired and smelled only of summer sun. Most of his clothes had been sent to Louvel in St. Louis, as he was closest in size and build to Raoul, and his thrifty German wife could alter them with her skilled needle. Such a long way for a crate of clothes to travel, and oh, how Martine had carped about the expense and the trouble, "Why not give them to charity?" she demanded, while I cringed at the thought of strangers, even worthy ones, pawing through them. But there were still a few things of his left, and last night I got up to root through drawers, finally finding a dark red silk-and-linen scarf. Where up against his neck it rested, the tiniest trace of scent remained. To bed with me I took the scarf and between my legs thrust it, crying only a little, why did you have to leave me, why, why?

I tried to recover his image, to reconstruct a man vanished, but could piece together only broken fragments. Raoul strode out of the sea at DeHaan, his bathing suit slipping down over one shoulder, the hair on his chest starting to grey, the wet tight wool a little too small and sticking to him. He laughed because I stared and then looked away blushing. As he passed he whispered, It's not anything you haven't seen before. Or on the maid's evening out, locking the bathroom door, I sponged his back in the bath, feeling wicked and guilty and thrilling all at once, as I soaped lower and lower down, regretting only that the clawfoot tub wouldn't accommodate us both.

One of the last times he lay in my arms, oh, which one? I can't remember and it grieves me. It was one of the last times we joined together, anyway. His tired flesh failed him but he touched me with tender fingers, over and over until into his arms I collapsed in exhausted rhythmic pleasure, moaning Thank you, thank you. That hungry mouth down below pulsated like the mouth of a koi in the Royal Garden ponds, its sucking, quivering flesh lavish with desire. Last night, in my sad and solitary bed, my fingers pretended they were his, even though they could never be anything but their thin and bony selves, although they thrust into that demanding koi mouth nonetheless. Only this time I didn't moan my thanks, instead I repeated, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, for sorry I was that both my men were dead and I alone remained. Then sleep swallowed both my longing and my lonely little assuagings, so that my small bitter twitches of satisfaction and all the questions which have no answers slid down together into the throat of the night.

Fruitless desire belongs to the darkness, but the morning mail arrives whether we will it or not. Soon I have to go to Paris. The lawyers need to see me to resolve some questions of ownership and assignment in the final disposition of Raoul's estate. Right after we married, Raoul switched his financial business from the ancient consortium patronized by de Chagnys from before Napoleon I, to the firm of Monsieur Gagnepain, a new young lawyer at the time with a few hungry upstart partners. Now time has worn down M. Gagnepain like the rest of us. The letter says he is ill, so one of his partners will meet with me to settle the affairs. There was his name, one I didn't recognize, but no matter. If he was in Paris in August, he was a workhorse, no doubt of that.

Then, good news, Martyniere wants to see me when I am in Paris, and that I look forward to, as we have not spoken since her husband's funeral of two years ago. She's sixty-three now, and no longer the timid young mother whose husband read every letter, who forbade her to receive me or write to us. She's no longer the girl who begged her brother Philippe, Raoul's guardian, to keep her portion of their father's estate and give it only to her when she married. That whole family lived as if the Empire would someday be restored and the Emperor himself reward them for their fidelity to tradition.

Now the ancient and formerly vast de Chagny family is vanished like smoke in the wind, except for Raoul's children. Of the old noblemen none remain: Philibert long gone, Philippe dead without issue, or none that he recognized, anyway. That old widower, the Comte Auguste has been dead twenty summers. I used to think him a vile and acidic old man, until I came to understand the bitterness of being a survivor myself. For him, Raoul's brother Philippe was like a son. Philippe was so like Philibert, it was said, and Auguste was broken by both their deaths.

Raoul had one cousin dead at thirty-five, no children. Another went to Oklahoma City in America, where he runs a successful trading emporium and has a great brood of children from his Irish wife. None of that horde speak a word of French. This de Chagny cousin came to St. Louis on business once and stood Louvel a great many drinks. Then both of them waded into the thick brown water of that river whose name I can never spell, and sang old songs in their native tongue until the fishermen pelted them with chum.

The ancient chateau which I never saw while inhabited has been long shuttered, most of the grand furniture auctioned off to newly-wealthy Americans in their magnificent homes in New York and Chicago, and due to be sold. Now an American senator wants to buy the entire structure, but not to live in France. Instead, he will have it taken apart stone by stone, then will label and box each fragment. Across the Atlantic he will ship it, and rebuild it for his own home in a place with the lovely name of Oyster Bay. I am glad Comte Auguste no longer lives, because the shame and aggravation would certainly kill him all over again.

The Parisian townhouse was never re-opened after Philippe's death, and now it has become a little school for girls run by a former nun. She houses her diminutive, navy-clad charges in narrow iron cots in the very room where so long ago a sad, desperate man climbed up the drainpiping to the balcony window, looked upon his rival, looked upon his death.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Erik escorted me to the Rue Scribe gate, and it opened for me as easily as the cave opened for Aladdin, but he did not fetch a carriage. It didn't matter, as I was glad after my long captivity to walk. The early afternoon sun burnished the shop windows with a faint bronze glow. The busy streets were more deserted than usual, except for those passers-by whose late and liquid lunches led them to start their evening of pleasure early. Normally I walked alone on the streets with vague anxiety, fearing either the drunken men staggering arm in arm, or the gendarmes who assumed that a woman out alone even in the afternoon was up to no good. Today it was as if I stalked home under the veil of Erik's protection, for the few rogues I met ignored me as if I were a fat old charwoman, and the few policemen strolling at the intersections looked the other way.

At the corner near my apartment in the Rue-de-Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, I stood and laughed like a madwoman. Clapping my hands over my mouth, still giggling hysterically, I crept up the steps to our grey blank building. The concierge swept the steps for probably the third time that day, and he glared at me accusingly. As he opened his mouth to speak his indignation, I waved my left hand at him, flashing Erik's thick ring like a talisman. Had he been Cerberus I would have fed it to him, but it wasn't necessary. He shut his plump-lipped mouth and blinked rapidly, saying nothing as I sailed up the steps.

The hall was warm and smelled of the remnants of boiled beef, a little rank. Inside the dim, long apartment the faded, stained pinkish-brown paper clashed with the dark wood of the wainscoting. I listened for Mama Valerius but heard nothing. Blinking in the gloom, I kicked over an umbrella stand as I headed towards my room. Then I shouted with surprise and anger, for a lump lay sprawled in my velvet chair, and from the snores obviously stole an early nap. I yanked the knit coverlet off of a thick-armed, olive-skinned female on the young side of forty, who pulled herself up and cried out, "Crazy woman, what are you doing?"

"Get out of my chair," I lashed out. "Who are you?"

"Well, pinch the nipples of Mary," the coarse creature exclaimed, "it's the runaway daughter."

Some of Erik's ferocity had rubbed off on me, having shielded me on the street, and it served me here as well. "Who gave you leave to make free with my room and my things? And watch your foul mouth besides."

"Quiet," she answered, "You'll wake the mistress from her afternoon nap. It was hard enough to get her settled as it was. Your gentleman friend engaged me to come and help with Madame. He pays well, your patron does," and she laughed low and suggestively. "Anyway, I have to take a little rest somewheres now, don't I? Not that you were making much use of this nice bedroom." But she lethargically dragged herself up and went off to the kitchen, where I heard a kettle being filled and the stove lit.

I sagged down into the upholstered chair she had just vacated. Exhausted as I was, my flesh crawled at the feel of cushions warmed by her wide rump. She knocked on the door frame. Bleary with tiredness, I said, "What is it now?"

"Have to get my apron and boots," she said, ignoring my temper.

I waved her in. "What's your name?" I asked. "I'm Mademoiselle Daaé, Christine Daaé."

"Mademoiselle, eh? Not by the look of that gimcrack on your finger. Or is that just for show? Margot's my name, and I been taking care of sick old folks since you was a little stick nursing your dollies. Maybe you'd like to ask me how the old lady is."

"Yes, I'm sorry. I'm very tired."

"Oh, that's obvious. We had the doctor in once," and then she saw my face. "No, not what you think. My employer requested it. As a precaution. He thinks of everything, don't he? And such a lovely voice, he could ask a body to run barebuck back and forth under the Arc de Triomphe and she'd want to do it, too. Anyway, the sawbones said what I could have told anyone, and for a lot cheaper. Weak heart, bad circulation in the legs. Not a thing to be done about either one of them. Addled in the head as well, but you already knew that. Kept going on how you was visiting with an angel, flew you right up to heaven, he did, and all I could do was agree with her. Been to heaven on some occasions like that of my own, when I was younger. Although from the look of you, I'd say more that you've been to the other place down below, with that smell of river water on you. You don't have that cheery glow I'd expect from a gal who's spent two weeks with her back on the tiles."

It was more than I could bear. "Do you talk to Madame Valerius this way?" I said through clenched teeth.

"Of course not," she grinned, and gave me a wink that made me feel as if slime coated me from head to foot.

"Please leave me alone," I said. "I'm going out later, but I need to get some rest."

"Just so you know. He had me pay the rent and the maid for four weeks, settled the butcher and the baker's bills as well, and fetched your pay from the Opera. It's there in an envelope on the kitchen table, alongside your mail. You can count it too, it's all there," and she sniffed with righteousness, even though I hadn't accused her of anything except lolling around my bedroom. "Like I said, he thinks of everything." With uncorseted hips wobbling under her shabby black skirt, she fetched her white apron, stockings and boots. All the while she muttered under her breath, "Some women don't know how good they have it with that kind of man, and who cares if he's ugly as Judas's arse? Just turn off the lights, I say, that fixes all." I sighed with relief when she finally brushed past me.

Shaking with fatigue, I rifled through the small stack of letters. Nothing from Raoul, especially no acknowledgment of my hastily-scribbled note, no indication if he would meet me tonight or not. Perplexed, I thumbed through the few. M. Moncharmin's secretary hoped my health was much improved. _La Juive_ was going to start rehearsal soon; would I accept the lead role of Rachel, the doomed Jewess? Touchingly, there was a note from Carolus Fonta, joking about the squawks of my understudies, and how the one now playing Juliet clearly was more suited for the role of the nurse. I counted the contents of my pay envelope, and as the crude but apparently capable Margot had said, it was indeed "all there."

I should bathe, I thought, but I'm too tired. I'll lie down for just a little bit, and into the bed I climbed in between quilt and blanket, not wanting my skin to touch the sheets where she had been. When I awoke, the late afternoon sun slanted through the western window and I jumped up, terrified that I had slept into the next day, missed the Bal Masque, that somewhere Erik lay bleeding and dying, and a "tear was rent through the fabric of Paris humanity besides," whatever that meant.

When I heard Margot stirring in Mama Valerius's room, I knew I'd slept for only a few hours at most. The address of the seamstress rested in the bottom of my bag and at the front of my mind as well. If I wait too long, my fear-clenched thoughts went, she'll be gone, and I will have no costume, not even a half-domino to cover my face. Then I lay quietly, thinking of what I would say to Raoul at the Bal Masque that night, trying to push all of Erik's ugly insinuations out of my mind but not succeeding, and wondering what it might mean for Erik to fetch me from my dressing room and ratify our betrothal.

Lying on my side, I twisted the loose ring soft and almost pliable under my touch. Raoul probably won't even be there, as most likely he didn't even get that note. That's why he didn't write. But what if he is? Why am I doing this? I want to see him one more time before he goes. After all this, I owe him at least a good-bye. Before I go, but go where?

Finally collecting my strength, I went to see Mama Valerius before I left. Margot intercepted me, saying, "Don't bother. I've got her settled, and I don't want her nattering on all night about you and your 'angel.' Besides, I thought you had somewhere to go." An India-rubber doll could not have been pulled in more directions than I at that moment. The clock demanded I go to the dressmaker's, satisfy Erik's demand that I return, meet with Raoul, assuage my guilt over Mama Valerius.

"Is she all right?" I asked, voice trembling.

"Madame," she said, "She is well-cared for. Your patron has seen to that. Go run your errand."

Her appalling cheek shocked me senseless for a moment. Who was she to tell me when and where to go? She laughed, as if to say, show me the door. "My affairs aren't your concern," I said, feeling weak and cowed before her stolid amusement. "I'll send the maid. I want to see her."

Margot shrugged her big shoulders as if to say, not my responsibility. The maid was dispatched with the address and instructions to fetch a costume, I didn't care what kind. I gave her a key to my dressing room at the Garnier Opera, and told her to deliver it there. Then I crept into Mama Valerius's bedroom. She lay half-propped up in the big rosewood bed carved with calla lilies around the top. Her eyes were half-closed and a little devotional book rested on the bedside table, too far to reach. Margot must have been reading to her. I wonder if the nurse-maid hated it, as she didn't seem the type to go in for religion. Mama Valerius herself had lost the ability to read late last year, not through any fault of her eyes, but from the general weakening of the brain that had started almost at once after the Professor's death.

"Mama," I whispered. "Mama, it's me, Christine."

She stirred and tried to rise up. "I thought you'd be back sooner," she said with a hint of a whine in her voice. "Your angel is very demanding, to keep you so long."

"Has Margot been caring for you? Is she good to you?"

"She makes good custard. And she reads to me all the time in the evenings. Best of all, she believes me about your angel. She doesn't argue with me. I told her he had taken you to heaven and she didn't make fun, she just said, oh, yes, I'm sure he has. I like that."

"I wasn't here much in the evenings to read to you, was I?"

She looked around the room. "Where's Margot now? I like the way she reads. She's always making jokes. I never knew there were so many jokes in the Bible."

Inside I groaned. What kinds of jokes Margot found in the Bible I didn't want to know. "Mama, when I was gone, did anyone come to see me? To look for me? For instance, Monsieur le Vicomte de Chagny?"

She blinked at me, confused. "I don't think so. Do you think there's any of Margot's custard left?"

Sighing, I stood up. "I'll go look." When I returned with the little dish, she seized my left hand with surprising strength, almost upsetting the bowl. "Child, what's this? What's this ring?"

I tucked a napkin under her chin, but her eyes never left the thick gold band. "Will you be leaving now?" she said, quavering. The film over her ice-blue eyes suddenly sharpened, and her mind cleared momentarily. "Are you married?"

Not knowing what to say, I stammered, "It was a present."

"From your angel?"

"Mama, I have to tell you something, something very important. Please listen. I haven't been with an angel. For the past two weeks I've been visiting a man. He gave me this ring."

"A man?" she said, staring, fogged over again. "Not alone, I hope. But you wouldn't do that. You are a good girl, and always were. But why did he give you his wedding ring?"

"It's not a wedding ring, Mama, not exactly. It's a ... a betrothal ring. I'm betrothed."

"Oh," she said, breaking into a wide innocent smile. "Just like St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary! They were betrothed, too. I think that's nice. Just like in the old days."

My face grew hot with shame. "I'm going to a party tonight, Mama. I ... I'm not sure when I'll be back home. It will be soon, though."

"Margot's not going, is she?"

"No, she'll be here."

"You're leaving with your angel again."

"Mama, I just told you," but she had already leaned back with shuttered eyes, letting the empty dish fall to the bed. I removed her napkin, wiped her face, and bowed over with sadness, left her room.

ooooooooo

In my dressing room, reflecting out of the long floor-length mirror, a blank-eyed scarecrow stared back at me. The red and black ruffled flamenco dress hung on my frame like a sack, until I tied it up in the same way I did with the dresses Erik had bought for me. She must have been the seamstress he employed, and I wished I'd gone to see her for myself.

Pulling the dress in as far as it would go couldn't disguise my stick-thin arms, my bony shoulders, my nonexistent bosom, or the black shadows resting under my eyes and in the hollows of my cheeks. On a fuller-bodied woman the ruffle around the shoulders and breast would have risen merrily on a revealing tide of plump firm flesh, but on me it hung limp and dispirited. I adjusted the full-face black domino, then the squarish headdress with its long black veil. The thick black fabric folds poured over my tightly-bound hair, burying its blondness under an avalanche of sooty lace. Who had picked this costume, the maid or the unseen seamstress? It never occurred to me that Erik had picked it himself, to give me only the illusion of moving about the Bal Masque unobserved. It's what I would do now, did I want to track someone without her knowing it.

Then there was the problem of the ring. I didn't want Raoul to see it. I could leave it in my dressing table drawer, but somehow Erik might know, it might be stolen, I could lose it. So from my bureau I drew a pair of long black silk gloves. They sagged on arms with so little flesh to fill them out, but at least they covered the ring on my hand.

Disguised as a sorry imitation of an Andalusian dancer, I stood in a corner of the great Garnier Opera rotunda, feeling small and inconsequential. I was to meet Raoul at midnight, and it was only half-past eleven, but I could bear my lonely _loge_ no longer. The partygoers whirled around me. I spied Sorelli and a tall red-headed man dressed in patchwork with long fluffy sidewhiskers, not Philippe de Chagny. Of course the Comte wouldn't come to an artists' ball, but Sorelli wasn't languishing alone. The tall, creamy-shouldered beauty wore a golden tulle tutu and a tiny gold domino that covered almost nothing of her smooth heart-round face. This wasn't Venice; there was no point in coming to the Masque if you couldn't be recognized. Their heads almost touched as they laughed and talked. Suddenly feeling very lonely, I headed around the bottom of the grand staircase to see if I could catch a glimpse of Erik, who had promised that he would come unmasked.

I drew a few curious glances because I was in the minority, being so heavily covered as to be entirely unrecognizable. My desire was to find some niche and simply wait there until the stroke of midnight, but all the crevices and dark places were filled with kissing, caressing couples, and a few larger spots held three or even four gyrating figures. An orchestra played something that sounded like a mazurka, but the noise from the crowd was abominable and the music could scarcely be heard.

Perhaps Erik might have gone into the auditorium. The velvet chairs had been removed and the carpets rolled up to reveal a wooden floor echoing with the stomping of hundreds of feet dancing to an ensemble. On the stage they sat, playing as loudly as they could, but the din overwhelmed them and thundered off the velvet box curtains, almost all closed. No one from up there was looking at the stage now; what went on in the boxes themselves was far more interesting. Someone had thrown long strings of silver streamers onto the stage, and a few looped over the shoulders of the indifferent musicians.

A man with a grinning Japanese-mask face whirled me around several times, then abandoned me for a young metallic-masked girl with breasts bouncing unrestrained from her unlaced bodice. The gyre of chaotic faces and bodies drove me out of the auditorium without a sight of Erik. Then the raucous herd began to move out of the auditorium towards the rotunda and its grand marble staircase. There, past the flow of gabbling bodies was the fireplace, next to the drawing room door where Raoul was to meet me.

I spied him at once, the only man in the room whose white Pierrot costume could not conceal his misery. He looked ridiculous. Being more slender at the time, he didn't fill up the pierrot's baggy, sacklike dress, and hadn't stuffed it with cushions like so many did. Further, he'd fortunately forgotten or discarded the hat, as it would have made him look even more conspicuous than he already did.

At first I did not approach him. The music faded, the crowds fell from my sight, and a great decision loomed before me. He looked me over several times with the same blank unrecognizing misery he cast on every other woman who passed by. If I turned away right now and left, he would be none the wiser. Soon he would forget his sadness and feel fond nostalgia for the girl who might have been, until forgetting about her entirely. All I had to do was walk away, and it was over.

My senses came back to me. At the top of the wide double-armed staircase some violinists were sawing away at some frenetic dance music. All the gas globes were turned up as high as they could go, and the lights and the thronging crowds made the air unbearably hot. Just as I was about to turn away, I looked at Raoul once more, and my stomach lurched in fear. Against my firm instruction that in no way was he to be noticed, he for a moment lifted his lace-trimmed white mask and wiped his eyes.

He looked around the room, again scanning unknowingly over me. It was the closest I had been to him since he lay on a couch, frozen and white in Perros, when the men from the inn had carried him back from his churchyard encounter with my so-called "angel of music." Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his eyes were sad. I couldn't hear his sigh, but I could see it, a long exhalation of breath, a slump of the shoulders, the collapse of the chest. He played with his mask for a moment. I knew then that when he put it back on, he would go.

So I walked towards him and took his hand.

Astonished, he started to speak, but I motioned frantically for him to be silent and to cover himself. The walls were Erik's, and he could be anywhere, could have seen Raoul's naked face already. We crossed around the foot of the double stairs, where the gathered crowd clotted into one silent waiting mass. The orchestra at the top of the stairs stopped playing. I cowered behind the swinging banister as it flared outward, hoping its curvature and the statue atop it would hide me. Raoul's hand gripped mine tightly and he put his arm around my waist, from the back. He's too familiar, I thought at first, but his hand was warm and he held me tenderly without clutch or grab. Into his steady caress I leaned, trembling with anxiety and pleasure both. Something was about to happen. Erik was going to make some dramatic display, some notable entrance to the party.

It could not have been more stunning. I heard him before I saw him, his stiff steps in boots slowly, deliberately thumping on the marble stairs. Soft gasps floated above the crowd, forming a wave of astonishment that crested and broke down the stairs as he passed. From our vantage point, I saw only the plume of his hat drifting past, and then he slowly came into view. His unmasked face was ghastly. I knew the kind of white greasepaint he used, with mother-of-pearl crushed into it to make his skull-bright face shine like light reflecting off bone. Thick black paint changed his eyes into two staring pits of darkness embedded into his ghastly face. Black pencil lines along his eyes and cheekbones suggested a literal skeleton head severed from its bony body and placed atop the broad shoulders swathed in red velvet. It was a skillful makeup job, one which emphasized every tragic, ravaged feature. He passed us by, and his wide scarlet train poured behind him in a cascade of gold-trimmed blood.

The crowd surged in front of us, blocking our view of everything but the plumed hat riding above it like a boat bobbing on a surging, clamoring ocean of heads. Then Raoul let me go, and he was transfixed with hot, fierce anger. "It's him," he whispered angrily. "The deaths' head from Perros." A few heads turned, and in my mind's eye I saw the strange looks behind their masks. I took Raoul's hand tightly, trying to keep him from pushing through the crowd to confront Erik.

Then there came a loud snap! like the sound of a chicken bone breaking, a short sharp cry of pain, and people laughed. "Serves him right," someone called out, loud and drunken. There were a few sobs, but I couldn't see who was hurt, or what had happened. Had someone laid a hand on Erik? The stilled hush broke, and soon the ballgoers were chattering, screaming, calling as loudly as before. The orchestra, so silent at his presence, began scraping away again at some round-dance tune. I strained to see the unmasked man in red, but he had gone around the other side of the grand foyer, and moving through the crowd was quite impossible at that point, anyway.

Erik was walking about, and all I could think of was to get Raoul and I away from him, if that were even possible. I pulled Raoul into a little-used hallway, and up the back staircase we climbed. On the second tier I tried to find an unoccupied box, but all were filled with partygoers or lovers. In one box two revelers sat on a couch, the man naked to the waist, and with hot shamed face I shut the door hastily to block out the sight of the man's gleaming, sweaty chest as he pulled the woman towards him. Up, I gestured, up further still, and there on the top tier we found an unoccupied box.

Before even shutting the door, Raoul threw his mask to the floor and walked towards me silently, his arms open to take me into them. There I would have fallen, except for the disturbance in the hall outside. "There he is!" "He broke that fellow's wrist, did you see?" "Down the stairs, look!" And over Raoul's broad white shoulder, through the door of the box, up the stair, I caught a glimpse of a descending red leather-clad boot. Pushing Raoul roughly to one side, I slammed the box door as quickly as I could, turned the lock, then swept the little curtain over the small round window.

"He's there," I whispered in terror, gesturing to Raoul to be utterly silent. He pushed past me, trying for the door, but I fell against it, shaking my head, no, no, trying to show that he didn't understand, it was essential for him to stay quiet, and to keep that door shut. For all I knew, Erik could appear in any box anytime he wanted, but I didn't think he would have a reason to search them all if his suspicions weren't alerted. He wanted to parade himself about among the partygoers, feed on their admiring gasps and sighs, on one of the few nights of the year he could go out among them, completely naked of face.

Raoul fumbled with the box door lock. "I want to talk to him. I want an end to this. Who is this man who's captivated you?"

"He'll kill you," I said as I pushed his hands away from the door latch. Why was Erik the first thing in his mind? "He'll kill me as well."

"Then let me find him. I'll fight him! Damn this lock, what did you do, enchant it? I can't make it budge at all."

"You want him to kill you? That's what you'll get for your foolishness. You think you're just going to throw your glove at his face, and that will be it? Some nice little duel with rules and seconds?"

"Why did you ask me to come here?" he said, giving up on the latch.

"I wanted to say goodbye."

"Good-bye?" Once I saw a man beaten by soldiers, when the Valeriuses and I first came to Paris, right after the end of the civil war. They were looking for the remaining hidden revolutionaries of the Commune, the ones who had taken over Paris for some months and fought against President Thiers's soldiers. Under the blood that man had the same dazed, vacant expression as Raoul's, only Raoul was bleeding on the inside rather than all down his face as that man was. Then his face formed itself into a cold rage, and our quarrel began in earnest.

I wanted to tell him everything that night, to throw myself at his feet and reveal the whole story of those two weeks. That stiff implacable face frightened me, and I didn't know where to start. "Stay here awhile, please. Until he's gone."

"Why not? You have one escort tonight, what can you do with two? Especially one who's a clown for whom you have no feeling at all."

"That's not true," I said. "I do care for you. I wouldn't have written if I didn't."

"You call this caring for me? What would hatred look like? You love someone else, or you wouldn't hide. And now you're going away with him." Suddenly his cold rage turned hot, and from out of him poured a stream of invective I could not bear to hear. His brother was right. I was just toying with him, making my lover jealous for some reason known only to me. Did it spice up my love-play to do that? "Your Perros friend has a clever mask," he snipped. "Useful for so many purposes, for haunting graveyards and Parisian balls. And why weren't you parading down the staircase at his side? You were certainly dressed for it. Or is he some married gentleman, who keeps you in the shadows, out of the sight of the public? Is that why you've been hiding these past few weeks?"

On he went, and even when he stopped for breath, I couldn't say anything. My veil felt unbearably hot in the closed-in room, so I threw it off.

"And to think that I even wanted to marry you ..."

"You can get rid of that thought. Haven't you listened to anything but your own voice? I'm leaving, I tell you. Perhaps even leaving Paris, I don't know. I won't see you again."

"That ought to make you happy, to have a flashy gentleman take you off the stage, out of Paris. Just a word of warning, Christine. Make sure he puts your name on the deed when he buys you that little country house. That way when he leaves you for someone else, when you feel as I do, and I hope that someday you do, then at least you have the house to remember him by. I'm sure you'll enjoy your retirement. My best wishes to you," and he gave a sarcastic little bow.

There seemed to be nothing left to say. "You think that's it. That's all there is. You're so sure."

"What is this play-acting?" he snapped. "You act like some kind of prisoner in a melodrama. Yet you take your pleasure wherever you find it. You come and go at will. I see no chains on you. Your so-called guardian certainly has no control over you. You could have written me anytime, but you chose to ignore me. Well, you won't have me for the buffoon in your tragicomedy anymore," and he ripped the ruffled neck of his Pierrot costume in anger, tearing the cloth. "You have a lover, one that's obviously going to keep you well. If that's what you want, who am I to stand in the way of your happiness? I'm not going to play the 'other man' in this farce."

"It's not a farce," I whispered. "It is a tragedy."

He stopped, as if considering. Then, slowly and deliberately, he reached for my mask, and I stepped back. When he put his hand on my domino I flinched, because I didn't want him to see the shame and sorrow written on my face. He hesitated a moment, then pulled it off gently and slowly, then gave a loud cry. I turned my head and closed my eyes, knowing what he saw.

He breathed in, a long raspy intake. "What's happened to you? You look like ... has he done this to you?"

"It's nothing," I said, ashamed. "I'm tired, that's all. I should be at home in bed, but instead I am here with you, and I didn't have to do it. It wasn't safe for me to do it. But do you appreciate it?"

"Your face," he stammered.

"I imagine you think I look like death itself," I laughed brokenly. "Find yourself a beautiful rosy girl with round pink cheeks, ones you can pinch on both ends. Go downstairs and take your pick. Any one of them would be glad to step out with you, take you home, and help you to forget your part in this farce, as you call it."

"Christine," he whispered, tears starting in his eyes. "Please, don't. Please, I am so sorry."

He was only a hand's width away from me, but he might as well have been on the other side of Paris. This had been cruel, cruel and stupid on my part to open a wound well on its way to healing. But what did I think would happen? That he would take me in his arms and kiss me? Sweat plastered his hair and he stood graceless in his torn, unwieldy costume, making him nothing like a young prince in a folk tale. I didn't want kisses. I wanted him to listen to this whole strange story. If only he would hear me out, I thought, but it's no use. He doesn't believe me now. Nothing I say will convince him that I'm not like every other singer, out to play one man against another for the maximum gain. He's already made up his mind, so be it. My own hot anger rose up. How dare he accuse me when he strolled through the Bois at night, no doubt looking for some entertainment in the dark? "I don't have to offer excuses for myself to you," I said in a clipped voice. "You believe whatever you wish. Someday you'll regret those cold and arrogant words of yours."

"Not as much as you will regret your behavior," he snapped back. "I thought you were a woman of honor. But you can't even offer an explanation."

"No explanation I have would satisfy you." I was really angry now. "I have to go. It's close to one." Imperious, a little contemptuous, I ducked under his arm and readjusted my mask. "Good-bye," I said. "Don't try to follow me, as you won't find me. Just go."

He stood with his open mouth shocked into silence. His lips formed my name but no sound came out. At that time I didn't know what he expected. Later I learned that his sisters were of the most mild and accommodating nature, who never raised their voices, who always yielded to the men of the house. He didn't know what to do when a woman wouldn't defer to him. When I flung open the box door, heedless of whether Erik might be waiting on the other side, I expected to feel his hands pull me back in. But he did nothing, and when I turned around and waved at him with a hot sarcastic gesture, he neither cried out nor followed me.

Away from him, down the dark and narrow stairway with its chipped and gloomy paint hidden from the public view, I fought back tears. He had practically come out and called me a whore, hadn't he? He acted as if he owned me, but he did nothing to claim me. Confusion and rage and sorrow all mingled into a cloudy mass that stung my eyes and filled my throat. I almost thought to turn around, but didn't. The hour was late, after all, and Erik would be waiting for me. At that point Erik's fixed and rigid commands, his stark expectations, his overbearing control surrounded me like a fortress of protection. With him, I knew what to expect.

How could it all have gone so wrong? I had imagined Raoul and I would hold hands, remove our masks, tenderly kiss, and then, peacefully and calmly, I would tell him where I had been, what had happened, what I was going to do. He would comfort me and cosset me, give me his blessing perhaps, but was that what I wanted? The sweating, angry man blocking my way wasn't what I expected. He hadn't seemed even interested in me at all, for his first thought had been to chase after his rival and hammer away at him, which I knew likely would end in Raoul's death. I had wanted to stand on the stage of his attention, but instead he had his own play going in the wings, one where he fought, shouted, used his fists.

Then shame and regret overcame me. Raoul had apologized, but I had not. I turned around and headed back towards the box from whence I'd come, thinking against common sense that if I had left a man at the door with his mouth hanging open, he of course by rights should be there when I returned. But he was gone, and the box's new occupants glared at me, or at least the woman did, especially after her male companion issued a drunken invitation for me to come in and join the fun.

Frustration pushed me down into the gutter, where Raoul thought I belonged. All these coarse gestures and remarks from the costume shops and rehearsal halls came to mind. "Make sure you have at least enough for her," I snapped, but instead of looking cowed, he grinned and his long moustache looked very black against his red face.

"Let's find out," he laughed. "I can make you both cry out like cats on the roof," and he half-raised himself up from his lover's arms as if to chase me. I grabbed my skirts and fled down the hall thinking, if he catches me, I will scream for Erik, and he will come. My slipper caught on a carpet and I almost tripped, but when I looked behind me, no one pursued. A few more drunken revelers came up the stairs, and I darted the other direction, sick with anxiety now. One thought remained, it was past one, and I had to get to my dressing room, that imaginary oasis of calm, of safety, of protection.

(_continued_...)

**A/N**: Louvel's song is a traditional folk ballad called "The Sad Song."


	15. Blessed Agony

**Blessed Agony**

**A/N: ** _Thanks to Jennie for pointing out Christine's taste in flowers, and GlovedHand for suggesting Erik's pharmacological propensities. _

I had never been to Paris alone before. All the way on the long train ride, I twisted my handkerchief into strips until it shredded in my hand. Remorseful, I pulled out a needle and picked off the lace trim to save and use for another one. That kept me occupied for a short time, but then the thought of that great city loomed up over me, for at the center was a mausoleum, a tomb into which I would not go.

Oh, Raoul and I had traveled to Paris a few times, when the children were older. We admired the Tuileries gardens, enjoyed an excursion boat ride up and down the Seine, had coffee and pastries in the cafes across from the Bois de Boulognes, in short, took in all the sunny and legitimate pleasures the city had to offer. We even sampled a few of the duskier ones, visiting the Folies Bergère and laughing that we must have been the only married persons there. However, the "coffin of Paris," as Erik had called the wreck of the Tuileries Palace, had been yanked out of the city's mouth like a rotten tooth. Between Raoul and myself, the National Opera was never mentioned. When we passed that great sarcophagus, guilt seized me, because after all, a man who had loved me rested there, and not so much as a single hyacinth bloomed on his grave.

Once, when Raoul slept, I slipped from the hotel early in the morning. After I found a flower seller, I placed the little bouquet at the base of the grand granite steps leading up to the entrance, leaving like a thief afraid to be caught. Once I had a Mass said for Erik at the Madeleine. Before the priest would accept my Mass card and my contribution he asked, Had he died in the graces of the Church? I looked him full in the face and unwaveringly said, Yes. Once I saw an old man in evening clothes on the street, thin, a little twisted in the spine but still unusually tall, and in a convulsion of fear and unexpected joy thought, It's him, he managed to live somehow, and but memory played tricks on me, for I had felt his departing breaths and tended to his cooling, stiffening body.

Still that great green-roofed building throbbed like a bruise in the center of my soul every time Raoul and I went to Paris. Now, alone, I sat quietly in the floral-drenched obscenity of a respectable ladies' hotel. A knock on the door startled me, but, oh pleasure, a telegram from Philippe. He had left de Haan to meet his fellow doctors at the Paris Medical College, and would call for me at 8 PM to go to supper.

So later that evening, Philippe escorted me to dinner at his hotel, a sort of men's club across from the Paris Medical College and frequented by the doctors there, as well as their visiting colleagues. Apologetic, he explained that we were to have a private room, as those were the rules for entertaining guests who were ladies. The dining room was for men only.

Settled down with foie gras mousse and a glass of Cote-de-Rhone, I leaned over to Philippe. "So what's the great change of plans here? I thought you would still be in de Haan. Did you abandon Anki and the rest, to come down to Paris to look at a skeleton?"

He looked sheepish. "You know, Mother, that I sunburn terribly. When Anki saw how red and miserable I was, she gave me leave to go." For indeed Philippe's face looked burned and sore. " She and the children are taking the train back home in a few days."

"What about the children?" I asked.

"Martine's girls stayed under the umbrellas, or played in the bathing machines until people shooed them out. Johannes and the rest are a little darker than I naturally, and you should see them now, as they're brown as nuts. Oh, yes, and Genna put a crab down the back of Baby Roland's bathing dress, so you see, you should have been there." Then he grew thoughtful. "I also considered whether you might need me tomorrow, when you go to visit the solicitor."

"I don't think so," I answered. "All the permissions have been obtained, including Louvel's endorsement as partial inheritor. After tomorrow, the chateau will be sold."

"It's going to break Great-Aunt Martyniere's heart."

I sighed. Tomorrow, after concluding my legal business, I would lunch with Martyniere, and was looking forward to our meeting not at all. "She spent her whole childhood there, Philippe. I understand how sad she was to hear of the decision. Your grandfather sold the farm I grew up on, right out from under us, and we hadn't even gone bankrupt, although in fairness that was coming soon. But there's no possible way she can even live there now, so what can we do? I think she regrets signing away her share so long ago. If she'd kept it, she could have blocked the sale."

"It's not the sale that disturbs me, because I never saw the place when it was a living house. I'll tell you honestly, and not to speak ill of the dead, but that always rankled me, that as children we were never invited to that big old place in the country."

I nodded, knowing how it hurt our children, knowing how some hurts can't ever be mended or soothed away. He continued, "It's as if we were contaminated somehow, that for the longest time, and weren't invited until we had grown too old to care anymore. We were treated as if we were cousins _bar sinister_. So while it may be uncharitable, there seems a certain perverse justice in the old place disappearing altogether. But all the same, somehow it seems gruesome," he said, screwing up his long face, "to take a house apart and reassemble it bit by bit elsewhere. A house is like a body in so many ways, serving as a glorious temple, as an enclosure for all the life within it. Time and weather assault it, so that it becomes sick and breaks down, and ultimately it will tumble into ruin. I knew the chateau had to be sold, but to have it dismantled and reassembled somewhere else, it recalls that English novel, what's it called, _Frankenstein_?"

"I don't know it, not reading English. Is it a new novel?"

Philippe took a long drink of wine, which told me he was about to launch into an exposition. He was not a handsome man, with cheekbones a little too prominent. A receding hairline, coupled with the normally waxy dome of his forehead, now reddened and inflamed, made the top of his face too broad and bony. But when animated, especially by music or a subject that pleased him, he glowed. "Quite old, actually, almost a century now, and this is the most extraordinary part, it was written by a young girl, no more than eighteen or nineteen, I believe. A mad doctor tries to cheat death by assembling and animating bits of corpses, jolting them with electricity. His creation comes to life, but doesn't please him, for not only is he ugly to look upon, he also is stronger, swifter, and more enduring than ordinary men. Also, being fashioned complete in every regard makes him ardent in love, so he begs his creator to make for him a wife, and Frankenstein does. However, in his fevered imagination Frankenstein sees the creatures multiplying vigorously and ultimately crowding out humanity. Thus he destroys the female version he's just created, and the being becomes inflamed with sorrow and rage. From that point on, it's war between them."

"What a terrible story." It never changes, the fear and hatred of what is ugly, what I carried inside of me for so long.

"A terrible story indeed, but a true one in so many aspects. This new being is incorrectly called 'the monster,' because everyone thinks of him as such, even though it is obvious who the real monster is. This poor creature wants only one thing, to join the sentient condition, the ensouled condition, and enjoy all that implies, including natural love."

A tear ran down my nose before I even knew it was there.

"Mother," Philippe said, and in his voice I heard the perfect echo of Raoul, all warmly masculine, "are you all right? Does this upset you?"

"Yes," I sniffed, "but I have to hear it. How does it end? Is it dreadful?"

He looked at me closely, a patient he was assessing. "Both die, the man and the being he brings into the world." I leaned my head onto the width of his sharp slender shoulder, and he embraced me, comforting. "I will tell you, Mother, I cried too when I first read it, and although my English could be better, the full weight of it pressed through the veil of language, and bore down upon me."

You have no idea, I thought, of the full heft of that story. "I'll be all right," I said as I dabbed my nose. "I've put aside mourning, but the tears still come."

"It's Father, isn't it? I should go to the lawyer with you. No doubt the administration of the estate arouses all those painful memories."

"Not as much as you might imagine," and I tried to smile a little for my son's sake. Even so, the cold horror of Philippe's tale still gripped me, and I wondered what sorrows that young woman had endured in life, to create such a lacerating story. Something like my own, perhaps? I envied her the ability to pour out her pain into prose, to redeem the horrors in her life by birthing something new. As for me, at her young age I had no creativity, unless the warblings of the canary be counted as such. It would have never occurred to me to write Erik's story, and yet this unknown girl had created something even stranger, if that were possible.

"If you're upset, perhaps I shouldn't tell you of the skeleton," he said, still giving me that careful scrutiny, choosing his words.

"No, it's fine. It's just sad, that's all, that a being who only wanted love should be denied it, and then die."

He squeezed my hand briefly in his long-fingered one, like his face normally white, but streaked with red burns. "As you know, it wasn't clear where the skeleton had been found, as the workers depositing the time capsules at first couldn't be located, and no one had kept any notes or records of the exhumation. There was a man, an attorney by day and a hopeful private investigator by night, who somehow insinuated himself into the situation, becoming a nuisance around the National Opera and always having to be escorted out of the building, so adamant he was to find the spot where the body had been laid. Finally they were glad of his annoying presence, though, because he did manage to track down two of the workers who originally found it. He exhausted his good graces quickly, though, because now he tells everyone that he was there when they found it, which of course is entirely untrue.

"We interviewed the two men, and none of them mentioned this amateur investigator being present. It would have terrified them more so than the bones. After all, where else other than in the National Opera, or any government building, would it require three laborers to bury a few boxes? Not only that, this persistent man believed that somehow this skeleton was tied in with some crimes, some kind of scandal there from a few decades ago. I already suspected a crime, so this seemed plausible to me, until he raved that somehow the authorities themselves were involved in whatever these heinous acts were, and conspired to keep it all hidden from sight.

"Well, our obsessed friend turned out to be half-right, which was unfortunate in a way, because these types, when they're right about one small thing, assume they're infallible in every other regard. In any event, the three of us, Gagnepain, Locard, and myself examined the skeleton closely, after recreating as accurately as possible where it had been found, in what position, and so on. It was deliberately concealed in a shallow grave near a small fountain at the bottom of a long staircase, in the second cellar. The clothes had been removed before death ... Are you sure you want me to go on? Here, a little more wine. The body had been rolled into a curled-up position, so the men said. They disturbed the remains, then hastily covered them up again, being superstitious types, although unfortunately not enough to leave the whole site alone entirely."

"Philippe, you sound so ... cold when you describe it. This was a person, someone who had a mother, a father, who loved." I almost said, and was loved, but held my tongue.

His face grew very soft. "I know that. If I sound cold, it's because I separate myself from these details, because they are indeed sad and shocking. We examined every bone, all the joints, and concluded that the skeleton had two broken wrists, not snapped all the way through, but of the greenstick variety of fracture. We knew they'd been fractured quite close to death, but not afterwards. From examination of the joint epiphyses, it was estimated the individual was fully grown, not an adolescent. You look white, are you sure I should go on?"

"Was there a ring?" I demanded, stricken with anxiety. "You said before that there was a ring."

"There was nothing unusual about it as a ring, plain gold bands like that abound everywhere. That the ring was there at all and not simply robbed from the victim, now, that's the unusual part. But the most interesting aspect was the pelvis. You know that Dr. Locard has been trying to apply scientific principles to forensic investigations. Being able to judge the sex of a skeleton would be of great use to detectives, and he thinks he can conclusively show it by taking measurements of the pelvic girdle. It's not exact, of course, given human variability. We couldn't agree on which measurements to take at first, between what condoyles and spines, but eventually we came to a consensus. She was a young woman, probably in her twenties. Someone had snapped both her wrists close to the time of her death, and buried her in a shallow grave with the gold ring upon her finger. She'd also had a child, but probably not that recently before her death."

"So she was a woman," I breathed out faintly. "But that there had been a child ... how on earth could you tell?"

He looked at me, proud in his new knowledge. "There's a fellow over at the Hospital St.-Antoine who uses those new Roentgen rays to look at bones within the body. He jumped at the chance to look inside the bones themselves. So we took the remains over there, and got a good look at all the joints, including the scarring on the pubis symphysis. We estimated it had been probably at least five years, perhaps more. She'd had the child at a relatively young age. Then the symphysis had re-healed, so we were safe in assuming she hadn't given birth recently, and anyway, no infant skeleton was found." Practically crowing with triumph, he said, "It was as I said earlier. There was nothing mysterious about this skeleton, instead, what we found was the victim of an ordinary crime, most likely a murder. There was no evidence of a head injury, no other broken bones, healed or otherwise. There had obviously been some kind of struggle, given the damage to her wrists. My guess would have been death by suffocation or strangulation. Of course, as the skeleton was moved, the tiny and fragile hyoid bone was lost. It's too bad we couldn't examine that, as it would tell us which of the two it was ..."

"The hyoid bone?"

"It's a tiny, U-shaped bone at the base of the throat, held in place entirely by muscles, as no joint articulates it to any other bone in that region. Upon strangulation it's often cracked or sometimes even fractured altogether. But since those dolts moved the body, then finished the time capsule burial, it was most likely lost. I recommended that we go down, exhume the time capsules, and sift through the dirt, but was mocked as mad. 'All that effort,' I heard, 'for some girl of easy virtue?' But that was ridiculous, she wasn't of easy virtue..."

"Why do you say that?" I interrupted. "Because of the ring? Could it not as well have been a man's ring a loose woman might have stolen?"

"No, because taking into account the padding of flesh, it was sized for a woman's hand, and would have fit snugly behind her knuckle. Most likely it was her own ring. In any event, a probable scenario is that they wandered down into the bowels of the Opera, the woman and her assailant, who was very likely known to her, perhaps even an intimate. They had some kind of quarrel, a struggle ensued, and she was killed by a means that left no mark on her bones, or at least not that we could see. Further, it must have been someone known to her, for a chance robber would have taken the ring. Whoever killed her wanted her to have it, wanted it buried with her."

"You amaze me," I whispered. "All that, from one poor abandoned skeleton," and Philippe beamed, the same bright smile I'd seen so rarely on his father's face. Inside my thoughts raced and churned. A woman, I thought. A young woman, who wore a gold band. Erik had mentioned "the others," had said "When a woman sees my face, she is mine forever." Was she one of them, his forever in death? "What's going to happen to her?"

"I've talked to Father Durant at the Père Lachaise abbey. The three of us agreed, we have bought her a burial plot, a simple one on the outskirts of the cemetery. She'll have a funeral Mass, a cross, and on it will read, '_L'Inconnue de l'Opéra_.' "

"The unknown of the Opera," I mused. "It sounds familiar."

"It should," he replied. "There was a girl found drowned in the Seine, of whom it was said that her beauty was so powerful, even in death she could compel. A morgue worker fell in love with her visage, and made a death-mask of her features. They kept her on display for the longest time in the Paris morgue, but no one could identify her, or whether she was murdered, or a suicide, so they called her '_L'Inconnue de la Seine_.' "

"At least this one you laid to rest."

"It's the least we could do," Philippe said.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Exhausted from having run almost all the way from the top tier of auditorium boxes down to my dressing room, I locked the door of my _loge_ and leaned against it, breathing heavily. The clocks had already finished striking, the bells had already rung calling the guests to supper, but Erik wasn't here to fetch me. Not that I expected him to wait inside the room itself, for he had never entered it when I was present. Suddenly a great emptiness opened up inside me, the horrifying vacuum of Erik's absence. I'll stay in here, I thought. No one will look for me. I won't have to face vulgar men or Raoul's sarcasm.

The mask made my skin itch, so I tossed it onto a chair, not looking where it landed. Minute after passing minute ground me between the gear-wheels of boredom. I thought of changing. This ruffly dress was a bit too long, but otherwise felt like a morning wrap, so soft and well-made it was. It never occurred to me that had Erik noticed a red-and-black Spanish dancer running through the halls followed by a white Pierrot, he would have known at once who that was.

I sat down at my desk and absently undid my hair from its tight confines, brushing it out and luxuriating in its long straight silkiness. That day in the garden at Perros came to mind, that day when Papa smiled at Raoul and then left us alone to talk, that day Raoul ran his lips over my fingers and palms while I quivered with delight, when he then dashed like a hart up the stony tree-arched road. After that, when I brushed my hair I used to imagine Raoul's fingers parting the strands. Out of habit that old fancy sprang to mind, but I angrily pushed it down.

It was cave-cold in the small room. From the _armoire_ I took a black shawl appliquéd with knitted red roses, one Mama Valerius had made when she could still remember to count stitches. I sat, and waited, and waited more. My watch had stopped again. Then, sick with loneliness, impatience – for what to happen? desire – for what? I pulled out some paper from my desk, uncapped the ink bottle, and put pen to paper in a way I hadn't since the first year after Papa died.

I used to write my father letters, long rambling incoherencies into which I poured all my grief and anger and loneliness. Once I filled an entire page with "You left me you bastard why did you do that how could you leave me how could you stay with me and not help me you bastard you bastard you bastard..." As soon as I wrote them, I threw them into the coal grate or the fireplace. Then I'd go to confession and weep out my sins to the bored and impatient priests, until, when I began studying at the National Conservatory, I forswore confession altogether.

In the lonely crevice of this night I wasn't angry any longer at Papa. It was myself I lashed, because as dreadful as the scene with Raoul had been, it had brought the blood to my cheeks and neck. Anger roused me to desire. I thought of the man with the red face who had made as if to chase me, and with head in hands I merged him with Raoul and Erik, his sweaty torso joining with Raoul's head, and over it all Erik forcing me down onto the carpet, his body pressing me into the hard floor beneath, screaming into my face.

I started to write, almost automatically. Weeks later I looked all over Erik's apartments for those pages, my suicide notes, a few letters I'd started to Raoul and then abandoned, but none of them were there. Perhaps Erik took them. Some of it went a little like this:

_Tonight I saw a man about to mount a woman, and I didn't look away. Tonight I come to the mouth of the cave that leads to the underworld, but no snake-tailed dog bars my path. Good bye my friend, my sweet friend with the soft lips who would not take me with you, goodbye, because tonight I die. Tonight I'm dying. If I die before I wake. What does it feel like to die? Never, never to know what will happen. Always waiting to see what will happen. Does Erik know? He knows more about me than I know myself. I don't need to think, I just need to let him move me from right to left, up to down, in to out. Out to in. Inside, shut up, then the seal on the jar broken and the warm spiced liquid poured out onto the dust of the ground, the shattered fragments smashed underfoot. Erik knew this. He always knew. I don't need to think when I am around him, as he knows my thoughts. Sometimes he seems to read them, but that can't happen, can it? Yet without me he seems to have no thoughts, just movement and instincts, like a great cat who brings death in his jaws. He says he will enlarge the coffin, with its snap-shut lid of death. What am I doing here? He will take me in his jaws and crush me. I will make him sing to me first. Why am I cursed with this love? I didn't ask for it. If he didn't love me, we could be friends. He could teach me. We could talk. Perhaps i could lure him out. Perhaps he could play the violin on stage. But this kind of love crushes me like bricks. It paralyzes me..._

"Poor Erik," I sighed, putting down my pen. "Poor miserable Erik." Then I hid my face in my hands and whispered, muffled, "Poor me, as well."

I felt him approach before I heard him. It might have been the shifting of a trap, or the groaning low movement of air in a narrow passage. But I think it was Erik, who with his clear pure voice could make a tone so low as to make the air shake silently with anticipation at his approach. The delicate crystals that hung from my little desk lamp shivered but didn't tinkle.

Then, as if very far away, echoed a song of passion so piercing no heart could have remained unmoved. The old illusion returned, that he was some kind of enchanted prince hiding his face not under a mask of iron as M. Dumas described, but under a mask of silver-embroidered silk. On the run from his enemies, hidden in a deep underground fastness, waiting for rescue, he would carry away the princess, throw off the disguise and restore the kingdom.

"Nuit d'hyménée!  
Ô douce nuit d'amour!  
La destinée  
M'enchaîne à toi sans retour..."

That secret place between my thighs that I had been taught to ignore first tingled, then burst into warmth as he sang. In he washed on the waves of that pagan hymn to the joys of married flesh, of Romeo and Juliet rocking together in an unimaginable dance beneath the sheets. As a child I knew the ins and outs of the barnyard, but he sang of the passions of the gods, and I wanted to taste those passions for myself.

Through the mirror I saw him, beckoning. "_À toi, toujours à toi!_" he sang, yours, forever yours. Like an automaton I walked towards him, ready to turn to one side or other blindly if I bumped, but instead of meeting cold glass I passed through to where he stood in the dim, dusty hall. He continued to sing and the stones of the walls themselves danced under the heat of kisses of flame, their senses ravished by that voice, "_Ta voix ravit mes sens!_" No longer was he dressed as the Red Death, but instead looked like a prince from the _ancien regime. _Wiped clean was his ghoul-pale face, and it flushed pink with desire. Gloved in the softest grey leather, he took my hand, and I gripped his tightly without freezing.

The last time I had made this passage, it was half-drugged, much of it on the back of an Opera horse. He was done with the last "Yours, forever yours," though they still rang in my ears, and simply said, "We go a shorter route." He led me down two cellars below to a narrow passage cut into the wall, hidden behind a set piece for a dreadful opera about the Hindoo of Lahore that no one bothered to perform anymore. Its vistas of pagodas and palm trees made it unusable for much else, so it mouldered down here, abandoned. The passage led to a tunnel that slid downwards, but he held me from behind firmly by the hips, so that I wouldn't fall. Then he pulled me abruptly as if to say, stop! and a trapdoor opened at my feet as if set to do so automatically. Around me he slid, and fell right through the hole. A sharp thump! on the floor below lured me to look through the hole into a dim, red-lit room, and his black-clad arms reached up for me through the opening.

"Let yourself fall, Christine," he ordered, and so I dropped into his arms. He held me for a moment too long up against his chest, but I looked away, so sighing he set me down in what was a most peculiar little room. All the walls were hung with carmine silks, similar to the blood-red membrane that I recall draped around his bed. They were full of strange reflections, as if they covered something shiny. We had fallen through a narrow little square in the ceiling, which he pulled shut with a wire. Some kind of massive construction, a frame of some kind that reached almost to the ceiling, stood in the middle of the room, and it too was covered with another large drape of red silk. I tried to pull aside one of those eerie drapes and see what was behind them, but as crisply as he ordered, "Stop! Don't touch those!" my hand froze in midair, more obedient to Erik's commands than my own.

"What is this room?" I whispered.

"My waiting room," he laughed, "for when unexpected guests arrive." He opened a red-draped panel, and gently pushed me through.

We walked into my own bedroom, in his apartments under the earth. I turned, astonished, to look one final time at the weird red-draped room from when I'd come, but he'd already slipped stealthily behind me and fastened the door. It was where he'd come through on that first morning, laden with packages from _Au Printemps_. The gaslights blazed high in my room, making it bright and warm. In the hot glare he looked me over critically. "Your costume doesn't fit right," he complained. "It's too loose."

"I took it in as far as it would go."

"You've lost flesh," he remarked. "You won't have the strength for what lies ahead."

"If I've lost flesh," I retorted, "it's because I stayed with you for two weeks, and we barely ate. Half the time I scarcely slept. You may be able to get by without those things, but I cannot."

He twisted his long fingers around each other, then muttered anxiously, "You're right, you're right, Erik doesn't pay attention to food or sleep when he's working, and he doesn't think of anything else then. I've taken poor care of you, Christine, and yet you came back to Erik after all." Then he looked around, as if understanding something for the first time. "You've saved Erik's life." He moved as if to take me into his arms, but I dodged him, moving away into the drawing room. Like a little dog he trotted behind me into the well-lit, bright room with the fire that never stopped.

He had filled his drawing room with flowers, remembering how I'd sneered at the commonplace boredom of cut roses stuck in florists' clay. Asphodels, daisies, sweetpea and Asiatic lilies, obtained in winter at what expense I could not imagine, rolled over each other out of bowls and vases in a riot of springtime color, and their scents filled the room with light, fresh sweetness. I pulled a red tiger lily covered with yellow spots out of a vase and inserted it into my hair. Intently he stared. The half-naked man in the box was willing to draw me into the circle of his arms, even with another woman there, but neither of the men who loved me then, neither Raoul nor Erik, would approach me and simply wrap their arms around me. It would have been so much simpler if they had.

He poured some very fine champagne, probably pilfered from the party that was to follow the Masque, and covered his desire with refinement of manners. Again I almost forgot that in weeks past he had rolled before me on the floor, called himself a dog and me a lying deceitful bitch, but his own bitch nonetheless, or writhed on his belly howling, or had forced my nails to bloody the sad twisted flesh of his cheeks, or had sliced a rubber simulation of a face to ribbons before my eyes.

A cold supper was laid out on the table. I rolled up some sliced Italian beef coated with pepper around a piece of Gorgonzola cheese, and rapidly polished off everything he'd put before me. I thought that if I spoke about him, it would keep his attention away from where I'd been, from what I'd done earlier this evening. "You surprised everyone with your entrance," I remarked. "Wherever did you get that idea?"

"From classical Athens," he answered, pleased to be asked, still preening a little over his dramatic costume. "There was a war, a civil war, although to them at the time a war between city-states was like the French fighting the Prussians in 1870. Athens and Sparta locked themselves in bitter combat, and the Athenians huddled behind the walls of their city, thinking it would save them from the more vigorous Spartan invaders. But the body politic of Athens, that gleaming host to rationalism elevated above the less worthy and more prosaic tribes of the Peleponessian peninsula, began to drip blood. But it was not a miracle, oh no, instead that body hemorrhaged, it stank, it rotted, and at the same time the people continued to deceive themselves, until half their number were dead and lies no longer sufficed."

I shook my head, I didn't understand.

"Hiding behind their walls the Athenians died, the blood flowing from their mouths and nostrils and eyes. The body of Greece was broken and blood dripped from it, so much, and then after all the death that could be passed around had been distributed, the fragments remained, endlessly multiplied on the ground, but none were left to carry them away in baskets. That will be Paris, Christine. Someday that will be Paris, awash in blood, rotting from the inside, invaded from without. I am not that plague, but only its messenger. The plague is coming. First it will be turned aside, but then the flood will wash up under the Arc de Triomphe itself." Then he laughed a little, as if the thought pleased him, and placed a few slices of beef from his plate onto mine.

"Don't you want that?" I asked, looking at the antipasto with hungry eyes.

"I don't need it," he remarked. "You do, you're a little scarecrow."

"I'll take the olives, too, those green ones." He spooned plump olives from his plate onto mine. They'd been pitted, stuffed with almonds. "Just out of curiosity, why were you late?"

"It's not important," he said, shifting a little and starting to drum his fingers against the tablecloth.

I said nothing, insisting silently.

"Very well," he said after a time. "That river of blood almost washed over a small part of Paris tonight, but instead, you were in your dressing room when I came for you."

"Erik," I said, "all this talk of suicide bores me."

"It didn't bore you when you wrote those notes."

I dropped my olive onto the plate. "You ... read those. Yet you act unsurprised."

"They were left on your desk, so what did you expect? You will never kill yourself, Christine, not while you are in my house, in the house that very soon will be yours as well. I'll do everything I can to prevent that."

"So what are you doing to prevent your own?" I asked, cresting lightly on the champagne, unaware of the sharks circling beneath the foamy surface.

"You are the one who is preventing it," he whispered, leaning over to me. "You are here, and you still wear Erik's ring." On my plate he placed the remaining few slices of celeriac and Andouille sausage. A great deal of champagne had gone into Erik, but almost none of the antipasto tray.

I leaned back, thinking that with Erik it was either feast or famine, towering joy or the pits of despair. Tonight, though, he seemed suffused with equanimity, wittily remarking about so many of the people at the party upstairs, and seemed to know who each one was, even under their disguises, as well as every sort of embarrassing and sordid detail about their personal affairs. Lulled by the full meal, the champagne, the warm gas fire, and the soothing caress of his voice, I laughed freely and tossed around my long loose hair. The red lily fell to the floor. Off came my shawl, and then, bare-armed as a valkyrie, with my hair falling down in sheets over my shoulders, I sprawled out in his leather chair, the one he favored. Laughing, I held up my hand, the thick gold ring forcing the two fingers apart like a wedge. Everything faded into the distance, the fire, the table, the wine, everything except the ring coiled in my hand like the serpent that eats its tail, and the two skull-holes that bored into me with all the force of their will unleashed.

He poured more champagne to the brim, and insisted we toast our betrothal. "Drink," he said in a cool and ominous tone, "because you are going to need it." Then he raised his glass, and motioned me to do the same. "To the union of ape and angel."

"How dreadful can it be?" I joked, genuinely drunk now. He watched me insistently as I drained the large fluted glass like a child made to drink some noxious remedy. The glass was very full, and when I hesitated, he put his hand on mine and pushed the glass upwards, so it flowed down my throat like a stream.

He brought figs sliced open and some kind of creamy white cheese for which I had no appetite, but he insisted I eat it anyway. My head spun, but he poured a liqueur into tiny crystal glasses. It smelled of almonds, and then I was genuinely dizzy. "If I drink more, I shall faint," I slurred, and his lips twisted into a peculiarly horrifying grimace like a smile, but it didn't frighten me, for his grin came from far across the room, and I began to laugh. He stood up roughly and a little twitch of fear pierced the the fog, but his look wasn't angry, far from it. He looked at me as if I were a sweet that would slide down his throat in a second.

"I can give you something," he said, and I came back to myself a little at the anguished urgency in his voice. "Something to make you insensate, so that you won't even know it's happened."

"Erik, you're spouting nonsense. I have no idea what you're talking about. Take those figs out of here, I'm already stuffed as a goose. Or do you plan to nail my feet to the floor and get the funnel?" and I laughed wildly again. Then, after so many days of eating virtually nothing, my stomach lurched, almost sick. I thought of standing, but gave the idea up as too much effort.

"Go prepare yourself in your bedroom," he said, looming. The smooth symmetry of his tall black silhouette thrilled me. From shoulders like beams fell arms longer than most men's, though thin. "I'll come to you tonight, as there isn't enough room for two in that coffin I call a bed." His laugh was small and desperate.

Then I did try to stand, but swayed wildly and almost fell over. In his arms he took me, cradling me against the flat hard strength of his chest, wiry steel embedded in his arms so deceptively slender. I fell in exhaustion against him. Everything moved very slowly. Trembling, he let me linger against his chest momentarily before carrying me into my bedroom. I breathed in his faint smell but nothing reminded me of corruption, only clothes stored in the damp and dark too long, laced with sweetish, pungent sweat. A slow thought bubbled up to the surface and cut through the thick crust of exhausted intoxication, what is his skin like under those clothes? Dizziness overcame me entirely. The room spun around and faded.

When I again opened my eyes, I lay in my chemise on my bed in the Louis-Phillipe bedroom. The gaslights had been extinguished and only one candle burned. I burned too, but with shame. While I lay dazed and half-conscious, long fingers had walked over me like spiders, undoing buttons and hooks, leaving me naked under a scrap of silk. Then I burned hotter, for fear that I had not imagined the cool, investigating hands that ran over the silk. Someone had whispered, So beautiful, beautiful as a dead woman, so still she lies. Someone shifted my breasts slowly from side to side, their scanty flesh filling large hands that tested their weight and pliability. Those hands slid back and forth over my belly and hips, searching for the softest and roundest spots, so to linger there. Someone gently kneaded the soft flesh at the top of my thighs, almost pressing them apart as I lay unmoving, but that someone stopped, sighing heavily. Then, in movements that filled me with a sweet ache, someone lightly rubbed over my triangle of short, curly hair, just lightly enough for silk to slide over the soft curls, back and forth, and then the sighs turned to a deep, low groan not of sorrow but of desire. Remembering that groan again, remembering that hand, swelled that nether spot between my thighs with new rich blood full and almost uncomfortable. The room buzzed softly and my limbs were fixed to the bed with lead, so heavy and unmoving they were. Languorously I drifted.

A little cough, a faint shift of fabric on restless limbs, and there he stood by my bed, eyes all over me like hands. He wore a dressing gown of some rich brown satin embroidered with paisleys and arabesques, and a nightshirt that shimmered like silk. As he approached the bed slowly, circling around it warily, his smell wafted to me from across the bed, and it wasn't death, but sweat, the sweat of male lust. With dampened fingers he suddenly pinched the candle out.

The room was plunged into the immediate and impenetrable darkness of burial alive. I gave a small shriek of surprised fear, and he whispered, "You aren't afraid, are you? You aren't afraid of your husband?" Without the gaslights, the room was chill, and I started to shake. There was a slight thud as his dressing gown hit the floor.

The heat rolling off of his body warmed the gelid air. When he reached for my chemise I gasped, for his hand wasn't cold and clammy, but hot and dry. He pulled my chemise aside, not roughly, but misjudged either the strength of the stitching or the power of his hand, for the seam ripped with a sharp slicing sound, and I moaned a little. A slither, as his nightshirt went up. He's raising it, I thought. Oh, my God, what's under there? My thighs were bathed with the heat of his body, and they parted on their own. I didn't need to see him to feel his approach.

All at once he was on top of me, holding my arms down at the wrists, his fevered anxious breath on my throat. He pressed his weight between my thighs and something stabbed aimlessly, something long and firm and hotter even than his skin, a little wet with moisture at its scalding tip. Trying dryly to enter, he murmured my name, saying he loved me, let Erik in, please let him in, please, in a whining, begging tone.

His inflamed body burned like fire, and when he almost accidentally found the crevice he sought and pressed hard into it, scalding fear erupted through the cracks of my composure. He scraped me painfully and I squirmed to get away from the hard insistent thrust of his body. My small frantic movements gave him another tiny advance in his hard steady progress, and he groaned deep and low with pleasure. Some slight moisture down below had gained him a little more entrance into that body which fought so hard to keep him out, and he pressed harder into his captive target. He had passed the threshold but had not yet gained full entry. I gritted my teeth against the dull tearing strain and thought, if it doesn't get any worse, I can stand this. Oh God, make it over soon. Women are always complaining that it's over too soon. Not soon enough, to my mind.

He held himself still like an enemy tired of sieging the gates, who after a moment of thought has decided to batter them down. The uncomfortable bundle of his nightshirt gathered up around my stomach, and he held me securely against the bed. When he rested his weight on my chest and poor squashed breasts, I stopped struggling and lay trapped, pinned, still as a corpse. Still he balanced himself patiently on the plump tip of his firm springy lust. Then, with no warning, he pushed himself fully up inside me in one fluid swipe. A long flaming pole of agony split my innocence in two and impaled me between the hips. With no shame whatever, I screamed loudly and freely. Incredibly, it gave him no pause, but instead spurred him on.

He slid back and forth, pulling almost entirely out of me so that I thought, hope against hope, that he would withdraw and be done, only to fling his full weight forward to spear me once more. A nightmare sensation choked me, of being trapped forever underneath him. He pounded ferociously, sliding in and out of that opening that I never thought of, to which I paid no attention unless monthly necessity demanded. In panic I seriously struggled then, trying vainly to lift my legs or twist my hips out from under his hard taut weight. My legs clawed aimlessly against the rough corrugated skin of his thighs, but he ignored my movements altogether, never stopping that slow, rhythmic thrusting.

Exhausted, I stopped struggling, but strangely, my passivity deeply roused him. With horror I felt him swell inside me even larger. He grew hot as the shame I felt. His long, low ululations sounded weirdly beautiful, if he were being flayed by pleasure. Then a shiver started between his shoulders and worked his way twitching and pulsing down the spine to his hips, until what felt like a river of magma poured between my useless legs. Giving a final choked cry, he lay gasping and spent on me. Slack, satisfied breath whistled through the teeth resting on my neck, teeth that pressed through thin skin that passed for lips. I thought he might bite me or tear out my throat at any moment.

Instead, he let his limp hard weight fall like an iron meteor to earth. Great cooling breaths annihilated me a little more with each one. It was over, but he didn't move. Then he slid with rubbery motion out of me, dragging a trail of wetness across my numb, aching leg as he released my arms and rolled over onto his side. He didn't touch me. It was over.

I started to sniffle, then without restraint I cried out in harsh racking sobs. Out of the blind darkness came his hoarse repeated whisper, "I'm sorry, so sorry, men are vile, and Erik is no different." The human thing to do, the kind thing, would have been to touch his face and soothe, tell him it was all right, murmur all the other endearments which withered on my lips. But no one stroked my cheek or whispered comforting words as hot fluid dripped from between my legs to the bed beneath, and thus there was no kindness for him in me, only the residue of painful humiliation. So in silence I reached blindly for my chemise and stuffed it between my legs to staunch the flow, rolling over so that the pillow hid my face. Good, I thought, as a creaking shift of weight told me he had left the bed, but his heavy breathing still filled the impenetrable dark. He picked up his robe and the cords swished as he tied it. "I'll light a candle," he said, and I cried out, no, I can't bear it, no, and he knew I wasn't referring to his face, but to that hot abhorrent horn between his legs.

"If I don't light one," he replied, all reason now, with no hint of the grunting, thrusting animal he had been only moments before, "you will trip and hurt yourself. Look, Erik is dressed now and will go," he said. "Try to rest," and a little candlelight peeped blood-red between my tightly clenched lids as he slipped out of the room. I didn't open them until sure that he had gone.

I'll never sleep again, I thought, but tears and terror kicked me into a black, acid torpor. When I awoke, I stumbled to the bathroom and was sick, heaving up bitter yellow bile that left me with a burning mouth and pounding headache. From between my legs I retrieved the ruin of my chemise. There were only a few streaks of blood on it, nothing like the flood which I'd felt. Then I knew that it wasn't the hot flow of blood that had washed over me, but he himself, the slime men make with their bodies, and I crawled sobbing to the bath. He had left a lavender soap for me, and its smoky pungent scent calmed me down enough to scrub and rub until I was raw, until every particle of him was off my body.

From Raoul I later learned full well what pleasures the marriage bed could bring, when the cry changes from a weary "When will this be over? to long wordless warblings of satiation. Then, however, I hid in the tub, ignoring the scrapings, the taps on the door, the tentative whispers of "Christine, are you all right?" I wondered how any children got born at all, for no woman in her right mind would repeat this horror.

Once I heard a sermon delivered by a visiting priest, a squashy Dominican with a pale shaved head who railed against the immorality of the Pigalle and the Montmartre areas, and who blamed it all on women who "denied their husbands their marital rights." I asked Mama Valerius afterwards what he meant, and she smiled vaguely, saying " I'll tell you when you're older, dear." She never did, though. Having just had those "rights" exercised energetically on my sore and aching body, I laughed cynically at my new knowledge, at my new flesh.

He had provided a beautiful dress for me of pearl-colored silk, with glass buttons and delicate lacework, the finest I'd ever seen. I spent the next hour preparing my toilette, drawing it out as long as possible. If shame could kill, I would have expired right there on the Aubusson carpet. Then a dreadful thought seized me. Erik was old, but everyone knew it was the age of the dam that mattered, not the sire. I could become with child. A great column of sickness and terror pushed its way up from my already-rancid stomach to my throbbing head.

Then I thought, that's good. If there's a child, he'll have to leave me alone. I remembered when Professor Valerius gave lessons at home in Goteburg. I must have been eleven or twelve, my hair still in ribboned braids, my skirts right below my knee, covered with a crisp white apron hemmed with Mama Valerius's lace. The mothers would bring their children and sit in the parlor, where the maid served them tea but no cakes or buns. Mostly each woman sat alone, reading, or staring into the fire or aimlessly at nothing at all, but once a week a trio came to rehearse. The mothers would talk, and out came rolls for them thick with currants. I was strictly forbidden to go into the parlor then. Instead my tea and brown bread were served at the long worn kitchen table. One grey drizzly afternoon, though, I crept in and hid behind the drawing-room drapes to listen to their chatter.

One student's mother was expecting, but at first she didn't want to admit it until her friends' teasing made her break down and tell them. She was tired of having to stay home during her confinements, she confessed, it was so tedious, so the longer she could conceal it, the more freely she could go about on these little outings, and they all laughed appreciably. Then one said to the expectant mother, you must be so relieved.

Why? she answered.

It gets him to leave you alone, doesn't it?

I don't understand.

Oh, come now. It gets so tiresome when they always bother you.

But you have five children, the expectant one said to her friend, shifting uncomfortably in her chair.

Yes, five children, and just about as many incidents of annoyance, the other woman said. Thank God. The rest laughed a little, but then looked nervously away, as if this subject bit too deeply.

That's why I feed my own, the third woman chimed in. They say if your husband pesters you during that time, it weakens the milk and makes the child sickly. Once I went three years, all through the confinement and the weaning besides.

Appreciative chuckles went around the room, but the first woman looked musingly into her teacup and said nothing.

Back in my bedroom in Erik's apartment, I smoothed my dress and hair. If there's a child, I thought, I'll make sure Erik won't touch me again for ever so long. He's lived without a wife up till now, and it won't kill him. But there can't be a child. I won't think of it. It was only one time. It's not possible, and I shoved the thought down where I didn't have to look at it. Pale and wan at finally having to face him, with a deep breath I opened the door.

The rich smell of brewing coffee made me gag. Erik stood before the table set for breakfast, shifting back and forth. I couldn't look at him, not because of his face, which had no power to frighten me any longer, but because of what lived beneath his trousers. This was terrible knowledge to have, to look at a man and know that something lurked undercover that could poke out and overwhelm and hurt. I had always hated it when men made remarks to me on the street, more because it annoyed and shamed me than because I feared anything in particular from them. But now I thought, They have the power to do this to me if they wanted, if they wanted to risk getting caught. And if a man did it to his wife, no one would stop him. After all, it was his "right." All at once I thought of Raoul, he has this within him too, this beast of hot horn, this grunting appetite.

"You look terrible," Erik remarked.

It had burned when I relieved myself that morning, and my head was compressed in some infernal vise. "Thor smashed my head with his hammer, and his goats left their droppings all over the inside of my mouth," I said. "Oh, please, take that coffee away, or I'll be sick again."

"I have what you need," he said, and withdrew to the kitchen. From the sound of it, he was brewing some kind of tea. Shortly afterwards he placed the thick, almost gelatinous liquid in front of me. I couldn't imagine what it was. It looked like something you would find in your handkerchief, and it made me sick to look at it. "It's boiled milk thistle seeds and ginger," he announced. "Drink it all before it cools."

The slimy, gingery mass slid down, and a few moments later I managed to eat croissants with strawberry jam, each berry suspended full and perfect in its clear red gel. He buttered one croissant after another for me, thick yellow butter topped with the round beautiful berries, and to please him I accepted some of his coffee. Surprisingly, it pleased me as well.

"Wonderful," I said, and he ventured a small smile that wavered a bit around the edges.

"I didn't think you would speak to Erik again after last night," he said tremulously. "You were very brave."

I looked away embarrassed, wishing he wouldn't have referred to it at all. Then he was before me, and there was something in his hand, something he wanted to present to me. I took it, feeling the familiar carved weight of cold iron, and the wry little Pan face mocked me. "The Rue Scribe key. The châtelaine is the one who gets the keys. All the keys?" I asked.

"There are two others, but those you do not want, I can assure you. Pray you never see them or hold them in your small hand. Those keys you will see only if you betray Erik and try to leave him, because those keys open the doors to life and death," and his voice chilled me so deeply I did not ask any further what he meant.

"A key is useless if one can't get to the lock," I said. "I still can't open your front door." So he walked me over to it, and it was actually simple, just a movement to the right of the latch, then the left, and when activated, the counterweight swung the massive stone door open as easily as a child opens the door to her doll house. He offered to show me how to work the door to his workroom, but I hesitated, not wanting to see those blank eerie faces so close to a living person's, but yet so dead and cold, so without soul. "Not now," I said, and he looked relieved.

He swept his arm around the apartment. "I bequeath all of this to you. Now I can take you around, and show you the secrets of my Opera."

"Why not before?" I asked.

Seriously he said, "Because you weren't mine, but now you are," and a little shudder started down in my loins, the fear of his possession, the echo of hot thrusts that reached deep into my body. "This afternoon you are going home. Don't look so shocked, you knew I would send you back for a time. Remember, that is part of our arrangement, until we can live together as husband and wife above. You're mine in every way now, but while I'm working, it's just more convenient to have you at the apartment. When I am at a good stopping point, I will let you know, and you will come back to me. I have to finish my opera and our nuptial Mass. Just remember, until I can wed you before the altar at the Madeleine, this marriage is a secret."

He explained to me that nothing was to be revealed until he could make "all the arrangements." I was to wear his ring at all times, "if I was to be safe and protected from Erik," and should feel free to go anywhere I liked, as long as I remained within the confines of the Opera Garnier, or the apartment on the Rue-de-Notre-Dame-des-Victoires.

"For I know you still have obligations to your guardian, and Erik will not interfere with those," he remarked.

"I've told her we're betrothed."

"Good, then she knows that you are bound to me, and that you can't marry anyone else. I won't have your position at the Opera interfered with or compromised. But nothing else, I warn you, especially to those gossiping girls upstairs, always in and out of each other's pockets."

"So I'm free to come and go," I said, still shocked.

"Not entirely," he smiled without humor, lips stretched tight over massive teeth. "I want you either here with me, or in the Opera itself, or at Mme. Valerius's apartment, where Margot will continue as both your housekeeper and Madame's nurse. Don't think you can fool Erik, as Erik will know everywhere you go, all your movements."

"You said you'd give me my privacy in my room here, and in my dressing room."

"That's right. Your dressing room, your room here are yours."

"The managers wrote me, by the way. They want me to sing Rachel in _La Juive_. Rehearsals start later this week. _Faust_ follows soon after that, but I haven't been offered that role." Then I remembered. "With your permission."

"Rachel is a splendid role, and very challenging. Don't worry about being offered the lead in _Faust_, I can assure you that you will," he answered. "These are my strict requirements if you are to sing that role, and have something left over for Marguerite besides. You go to rehearsals, you go to bed early and sleep in late. I will give you some teas if you wish, to calm your mind and help you sleep. You let Margot care for you as she cares for Madame Valerius, and do as she says, being as obedient as a little child. If you are not, I will hear about it. I mean this seriously, Christine, you go nowhere else. If you do, Erik will know. Take cabs to and from her apartment when you go to rehearsals, as I do not want your voice chilled or strained. I haven't decided about your little friend yet. Perhaps you can help me with that."

"My ... little friend?" I gulped.

"Surely you didn't think you went unnoticed at the ball?" and he laughed a bit nastily. He stalked over to me with spastic movements, a lean predator with a face as blasted as the surface of the moon, whose jaws and teeth could crush me. "I don't think you will betray me," he said softly, "at least not with him. Were it his older brother, oh, that would be a different story. That one I would just have to kill outright, as he would be a truly formidable rival. Fortunately he's besotted with his long lovely ballerina, although he doesn't know what treachery she has in store for him," and I remembered Sorelli with the tall red-headed man at the Bal Masque. "So you may entertain the little wolf cub, Christine, for I know now with certainty when his ship leaves. Besides, he is timid and no threat to me. Feel free to visit with him at Madame Valerius's apartment, as long as Margot is there to chaperone you. Or entertain him in your dressing room, for that matter, anywhere in the Opera. For remember, the walls and floors and traps are mine, everything but the roof. I do not go to the roof.

"It will be a good experience for him, to learn the particular kind of exquisite unhappiness that comes when you love a woman beyond all reason, and she can never be yours. It's a greatly broadening experience, and he will benefit from it. Perhaps he will even thank me for deepening his education. I, on the other hand, will finish my opera, the one I have sworn to take with me into the grave. You will secure two splendid performances, two triumphs. Isn't that nice, Christine? Everyone wins."

He said this so calmly, so rationally, and yet underneath his voice thrummed a ragged edge I had never heard before, not when he dragged me by my hair, not even when he waved his silver slicing knife. All I could manage was a silent nod, swallowing hard against the dry, terrified lump in my throat.

"Good," he said. "It is always best when a husband and wife understand each other. Since you do not have to return for several hours, I thought I would show you some of the peculiar and fascinating sights under the Opera. Shall we start with the Communard dungeons?"

(_continued..._)


	16. Hands

**Hands**

**A/N: **_Later on there's a little whiff of "V for Vendetta." Also, Jennie, my advisor on all things Scandinavian, tells me that Christine's lacework isn't traditional, but I've let the character have a little artistic freedom..._

Monsieur Gagnepain's legal offices were housed in a narrow grey building with a front door of carved ornate walnut, trimmed with brass. Brass vines grew out of the mouth of a metallic male face which formed the knocker, and they made leafy curves around the oval cut glass window below. The golden face leered at me as I touched the ring in its mouth. It seemed pinned down by the weight of vegetation pouring forth from its fat cheeks.

A valet as tall and grey and flat as the building itself let me in, staring over his half-frame wire glasses. The noise of the Paris street slowly faded as he closed that massive door, walling us inside a dark woodpanelled foyer thickly carpeted in crimson. Portraits of lawyers long dead lined the corridor. At first he didn't know whether to let me precede him, as he should with a lady, or lead me himself, as I did not know the way. I waved him on, and he harrumphed a little, as if I made his life difficult by not being a gentleman.

The law offices occupied the first floor. The two above were given over to rooms for the young unmarried lawyers, the clerks, the accountants. Raoul used to joke that M. Gagnepain was as discouraging of marriage as the abbot of a monastery, for his employees were sometimes loth to give up the comforts of their rooms above the brass-encrusted hub of activity. When they lived in his rooms, they received two meals a day, clean linens, and coal for the fire. The maids were drawn from the leanest, scraggiest, and oldest ones who could still work. They lived in smaller, poorer rooms on the top story. M. Gagnepain set two strict rules – he made no bed-checks, but his servants were strictly off-limits, and anyone who touched one was summarily dismissed. Similarly, no women were to be brought into the building, save mothers or sisters. Other than that, as long as the solicitors and clerks were at their desks at nine o'clock sharp, he asked no questions.

It was a remarkable system, and it really did encourage diligence as well as bachelorhood. The few married solicitors (aside from M. Gagnepain, who claimed that it was his sensible Swiss wife who had thought up the idea) complained that they were being unfairly punished for their married state, and he promptly gave them a bonus for each new baby. "He's a social reformer," Raoul explained when he first told me that he had moved all of the de Chagny legal business to this upstart's firm. "But he wins his cases, and that's why people come to him, even if he's new, and has no family connections."

Now, as I sipped green Chinese tea brought by the valet, I regretted not meeting the legendary attorney who over the decades had stood Paris on its ear by winning one inheritance dispute after another. More than a few of his cases involved men who tried to get their wives declared mad, so to seize their dowries or inheritances, or to have prenuptial agreements set aside (and a few wives trying to do the same.) Indignant fathers and siblings of these mistreated spouses knew whom to seek out for relief. The suffragettes of England had fêted him at a dinner, claiming he had done more to release unjustly imprisoned women than anyone else in France, but he refused to go. He had done it for one reason, and one alone, he said, the money. A fond reader of American novels, he liked to joke in the style of one such writer, "Rumors of my altruism are greatly exaggerated."

But time grinds down even the mill-wheel, and today he was no longer a young upstart, but a sick old man who had left the firm in the hands of his junior partners. Each was reputed to be as unconventional and energetic as himself, and one of those I was about to meet.

From the dim velveted waiting room I walked into glossy wooden brightness. The morning sun poured through the uncurtained windows of a large, cluttered office, so all that could be seen of the man behind the desk was the blinding glare reflecting off his glasses. Slowly into view came a round face with thick side whiskers that joined full and curly under the stubby nose. His chin poured over the starched top of his pristine white collar. The light made his glasses opaque, so I couldn't see his eyes.

"Jacques Lalonde Peillard," he said in a rich basso profundo. "At your service, Madame de Chagny." Blindly I extended my hand, and at once it was seized and cushioned by warmth, as if two pillows from the divan had risen up of their own accord and embraced me with their rough, dry fleshiness. The backs of his hands were covered in profuse, fox-colored hair. His breath on my skin was warm, too, and a little moist. Then he let me go, lingeringly, and as the sun beamed off his snow-white cuffs, he waved me to sit. The valet pulled the chair out for me.

"I'd have done it myself, Madame de Chagny," he rumbled, "but I'm too comfortable. Just got settled in this morning." In another man such breach of manners would be shocking, but he smiled warmly when he said it, settled comfortably in the wide leather chair. All the papers were laid out neatly on his desk, an oasis of broad, glossy mahogany order in that tumbling chaotic room. His hair was the same rich color as the wood, a little thin on top, but still full and curly on the back and sides.

I wanted to inquire about M. Gagnepain's health, but there was no time. Quickly he went about the business at hand, and Philippe's worries were groundless, for he needn't have been present at all. It took no longer than an hour, and afterwards Peillard rang a little bell. One of his clerks came in, a long thin man with a somber expression. "Type these up for Madame de Chagny," the solicitor said a little breathlessly, "so that she can have them to take with her. You can wait, Madame, can you not? If you wish, I will have more tea brought in."

"You're surprisingly calm," he remarked, as I squeezed lemon into a fresh cup. His he took with milk, English style.

"For what, M. Peillard? Why shouldn't I be?" I asked, genuinely curious. He rested his hands over his loose big stomach, the bare left hand on top. I thought of my own ring, which I still wore.

"Most women in your position would be in tears at the sale of a family estate, especially under the unique circumstances."

"Circumstances?"

"Having the building itself disassembled, and moved to the New World. We had some disputes about that, as I'm sure the late M. de Chagny told you." Then he stopped. "Forgive me, Madame, for taking the liberty."

"It's fine," I said. "It's been five months, God rest his soul."

"You're enduring well, I'm sure." He leaned forward, crossing his big arms over one another on the desk.

"I was never close to the family," I said, wondering if he wore no ring, as many men didn't, or if he lived upstairs in the bachelor quarters. He's a little old for that, I thought, being about forty-five, from the silvery touches above his ears. Then his warm round face encouraged me to an uncharacteristic frankness. "I married in from the wrong side of town, so to speak."

"Yes, that was clear," and even though he spoke seriously, there was a little bass laugh underneath. "None of these documents bear your family crest, and no crest was ever merged in with your late husband's."

"M. de Chagny put all that behind him as a young man. The family never quite forgave him."

"So I assumed, when gathering permissions to take to the magistrate, so that the removal of the structure might be sanctioned." Suddenly he shook himself, as if something occurred to him. "I like the sunlight," he said, "but perhaps you might not. Would you like me to draw the blinds a bit?" I nodded, and as he rose to pull the wooden blinds down over the east window, I tried not to look at his large, strong frame, how the fabric of his dress coat strained across his back, how the thick muscles in his legs pumped as he moved across the room. He accidentally kicked a volume left on the floor, and apologized.

Dimmed, the room seemed softer, more inviting. "Tell me something, M. Peillard," I said. "My late husband has told me that you are a relatively new firm. Yet when I came in through your foyer, it looked as if you'd had attorneys here that went back to the reign of Napoleon I."

He grinned, boyish. "M. Gagnepain bought them at auction. He thought it would impress the clients. He didn't even know who half those men were."

I fought laughter, then picked up a lemony biscuit sprinkled with sandy sugar. "Your wife bakes well."

He blushed, eyes crinkling behind his glasses, and with the glare gone, I could see they were medium brown, like a fox's. "I have none, I'm afraid," he remarked.

All the wiles of Paris which I never used in my youth leapt unbidden to my aid. Through lowered lashes I murmured, "Most unfortunate, Monsieur. So you are a widower? How sad."

"No, Madame," he said, faintly blushing now, "I'm a bachelor, and have never married."

I sighed, as if to say, in all this city, not one for you, then laughed a little inside. You're older than him by a good seven years, I told myself, maybe more. Some men grey up around the edges early. And if he isn't married by now, there's probably a reason. "I understand M. Gagnepain is generous to his employees," I remarked, giving a faint gesture towards the upstairs.

"Indeed," he said. "It is very comfortable here, so there are compensations. And I do have my own interests outside of the law to keep me occupied." I smiled encouragingly, so he went on, "I met the late M. de Chagny on his last visit to our office, when M. Gagnepain introduced us, informing me on all the particulars of the estate" and he rolled a pencil in his round fingers, twiddling the end, pressing his resilient fleshy fingertips with the point. "M. Gagnepain's health was failing, even two years ago."

"He's permanently retired, then?"

"Assuredly. It's his liver, failing to the point where he no longer can leave his home." His face was open and fresh like a boy's, despite the plump chin and silver-tinged hair. He's never had a man's cares, I thought. But his freshness appeals to me, it's like going on a holiday. Then we sat silently for a moment, and he fidgeted a little. "I'll see what's to be done with those papers. I expected them to be completed for you by now."

He returned with the clerk, who notarized each form as I signed it. It was formal, solemn, like signing a writ of execution. The clerk handed my copies to me and went to file the others. Since I stood, my lawyer did too, and the same awkward full air descended upon us again, as if that room of bare wood and thick books had grown too small. He filled the space behind his desk.

"The best regards to your children," he said presently. It was as if neither of us wanted to move towards the door.

"I'll tell my son, Dr. Philippe de Chagny," I remarked. "He's in Paris at present, on some medical business."

His face went pink, and he became transfixed, then almost seemed to visibly lighten, as if his round full form were being pumped full of helium, rather than filled solid with flesh. "Indeed? I didn't make the connection. Philippe de Chagny is your son? The medical doctor?"

"Yes," I said, suddenly uncomfortable, but flushed at the same time, because his eyes bored into me now, no longer soft and foxy-warm, but hot with reddish-brown fire.

"Madame," he said, breathless, "I would have never suspected, for you look far too young," and I could not hide the blush that blossomed across my cheek. "I would ask you to have lunch with me today, but some boring Justice undersecretary has invited those in our firm to the Ministry, and it would be impolitic for me not to attend. But tomorrow? You will still be in Paris tomorrow?"

"I will," I answered, as flustered now as he was, glad that I had the appointment with Martyniere, but regretting it too. "I'm afraid I'm otherwise engaged, though."

"Supper, then?" He saw me draw back a little, and then hesitated. "No, that wouldn't be fitting, would it? You still wear the black. But the next day? Surely you have shopping to do, friends to visit, and will be in Paris yet another day?"

I could stay in Paris, but didn't want to admit that. "Monsieur, I'm afraid I have responsibilities in Brussels ..."

"Breakfast, then. Before your train, the day after tomorrow. At ten o'clock."

He waited, leaning over the desk with his big, strong shoulders, and I started to chide myself for weakness, but then that laughter bubbled up inside again, something wild and fresh. Not wanting to appear too eager, I hesitated and appeared to calculate. "But you have your duties at the office..." I demurred.

"Never mind that. I will manage. Your hotel is the Cotillion, correct? As I recall, there is a cafe cat-a-corner from there."

"Yes," I answered, "with excellent brioche. They make it with golden currants."

"Have some with me there," he said. "At ten o'clock."

Breathless as a schoolgirl, I agreed and took my hasty departure, fearing that as fast as I might prop up the fortress walls of coquetry and hesitancy, as quickly they might crumble.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Erik wanted to show me the Communard dungeons, and so along we went down a planked walkway that twisted through low-ceilinged dark tunnels. Every twenty meters or so, a tiny gaslight flickered. Erik carried a lantern which cast a dim yellow glow on the dripping grey walls. From side tunnels cool breaths of air blew over me, invigorating despite the damp gravelike smell.

He walked ahead of me, testing for weak spots. In a slouched soft hat his head almost scraped the low ceiling. My head and neck were warmly wrapped in one of his scarves, a soft cashmere mixed with some silk. It smelled like him, sharp and a bit musky. "Don't go so fast," I called out at one point, afraid of being left, and he slowed down like a ship coming into port, tall and wide in his long cloak, but did not turn around. He filled my thoughts as his frame filled the narrow corridor ahead of me, lit into a sweeping shape of black, silhouetted by the lantern which he carried in front of him. His herbal drink and the cool, damp air of the tunnels had cleared my head, but the feel of him inside my body would not fade. There was no residual pain, no more burning or ache. What remained was the knowledge into which I had been initiated, the sensation of being opened up and exposed, of being fractured into separate parts and put back together again, but as what?

At the few rough or broken spots, he offered me his arm but did not touch me otherwise. He talked on and on about one of his favorite subjects, the draining of the swamp at the foundations of the Opera. The ragged emotional edge had gone out of his voice and he became animated, as if digging a gigantic hole and filling it with a concrete tub were the most fascinating thing in the world. Even so, I scarcely listened, only making appreciative murmurs now and again. When I had arranged the scarf in my bedroom's mirror, it half-surprised me that there was no mark on my forehead, no scarlet sign screaming to the heavens that a virgin had been deflowered. Now that I walked behind him, every step brought another awareness of some part of me so long before unnoticed, now forged into awareness by his defining strokes. A strange, solitary pride stole over me, for having endured. For having prevailed.

When he turned a corner and said, "Here we are," I expected something like a medieval dungeon out of the engravings of a romantic story. Instead, in a row ran six or eight little wooden doors with strips of iron across them. He opened one and let me peer into the tiny, earthy-smelling space. It looked like the open mouth of a grave, and I shuddered. He put his lantern up to the hole of the little crypt and inside I could see chains, most fixed into the wall, a few strewn on the earthy floor.

A horrible thought rose up. "Were you in one of these?" I whispered.

He nodded, slowly. "This one. For two weeks."

"This very cell ... It amazes me that you could come back here. And to be imprisoned, when you said you were on no one's side during the uprising."

"That's right, I wasn't. They could both go straight to hell, as far as I was concerned. But a man must associate himself with one side or another in order to live, and since I was in Paris during the siege and afterwards, the Commune was whom I would work with. They were grateful of my services, at first."

"What did you do for them?"

He laughed, short and humorless. "Munitions. They planned to rig major buildings throughout the city with explosives in their basements, set to ignite. It wasn't a matter of 'if General Thiers's army managed to breach the city walls,' it was a matter of 'when.' They thought to hold off the army advancing from Versailles with that threat, and my task was to make it so that a few buildings could be used as examples, should the Comunard's bluff be called. They didn't have enough gunpowder, you see, to put inside all of them," and here he chuckled mirthlessly once more. "Thier hopefully would not suspect that it was a bluff. That was where I came in. Certain buildings were selected to be set up with actual explosives that could be detonated, and others – the vast majority of others – were to be set up with apparatus that the casual observer would take for explosives. Anyone getting close enough to tell would risk ignition. For the dummy munitions, we took barrels of rice and put thin layers of gunpowder on top, near the igniting wires. Someone foolish enough to open one would assume the whole barrel was chock-full. Would you like to see inside?"

The worst fear I had on earth, what made my throat clench and my stomach churn, was to be in a small, entirely dark space, with no escape. For the first time it occurred to me that someone else could hate this too, and had to endure it as well. "I don't think I can," I breathed. "Erik, don't make me."

His voice was like liquid silk poured over glass when he wanted it to be. "No, of course not," and he smiled, but it was not a reassuring one. Then he stepped in, and the little cell was too low-ceilinged for him to stand. Crouching like an ape, he swung the lantern around, as if drinking in the sight. On the wall someone had scratched the letters "R" and "C" with some kind of instrument, perhaps broken stone, as the letters were large and crude.

"R.C.?" I asked.

"My cell mate," he said, speaking low and with respect. "A priest. It stands for _Regina Coeli_."

"Queen of Heaven, of course."

"He had a beautiful voice, one of those men who could actually chant the Mass and not just gabble it. I sang it for him one day, the _Regina Coeli_ hymn, and he cried. 'She isn't going to help you,' I told him, and I was right, for the next day they came to take him away, but that was no surprise, as he was an irredeemable monarchist who spit both on the Republic and the Commune. They had occupied his church, taken it for some kind of office or meeting place, and it made him furious. I had to admire him, as he was one of the few truly fearless men I have ever met. We could hear the screams of the tortured men from down the hall, and after we endured listening to one terrible session, I offered to dispatch him myself ahead of time, quickly and painlessly, but that provoked a lecture which wearied me with its theological tedium, and so he met his fate."

"Why were you in there?" I asked, looking anxiously around the corridor, as if expecting red-shirted, red-capped men to dart out suddenly and drag me into one of those little tombs. "I mean, if you were helping them."

"Why? Because chaos ruled the Commune." A little whine crept into his voice. "They didn't trust me, it was the same as in Persia, and in Constantinople too. Erik performs whatever service is required of him with diligence and loyalty, and is met by jealousy, and deception, and betrayal." He looked at me, hard and darting. "The so-called 'Committee for Public Safety' was formed, and they were imprisoning and shooting anyone right and left, even each other at the end. Weeks into the month of May, when it became clear that the city would be breached and they would lose, everything descended into panic. No one was safe, everyone was mistrusted. Rather than cease their own foolish grandstanding – pretending to be medieval peasants holding off a modern army within the walls of a city – they instead wasted their few precious remaining weeks hunting out traitors in their midst.

"One of the buildings we had wired to explode, a municipal courts building near the Bourse, failed to go off. They blamed me, accused me of secretly working for Thiers. Others accused me of working for the Prussians, which was moronic to the extreme, as the Prussians were watching the Paris stand-off with great amusement, waiting to see how bad things got so they could press the Third Republic for a harder surrender. The idiots had blundered it, no doubt, yet into the pit they threw me."

"But you helped them. They were rebels, criminals."

"And the Republicans were not? The monarchists were not, for that matter? What about the Prussians themselves, who looted and pillaged their way across eastern France? All are criminals, Christine, every one of us. We feed on living things, drain the substance of life from everyone around us from our first moments of existence."

"Erik, why do you come here?"

Tired of crouching, he sat down on a block of stone that no doubt had once served as a seat. "Because it was in here that I faced my own death. I thought I would die in here. Death terrified me, even though I had become so familiar with it."

"You feared hell."

"Not hell, because I believe in neither heaven nor hell, only blackness and endless nonexistence. But the instinct to live did not die easily. In this cell I faced the black, and sometimes I like to come back and revisit that memory. You might say that in a sense, this is my place of true birth, that in the place we face our death we are truly born. And also," now he looked shy, turning away a little, "I wanted you to see it, too."

"You know I can't go in there."

"Small dark spaces frighten you, I've seen."

The choking sensation eased a little. "You blew out the candle last night."

"It was to spare you, to subject you to the lesser of two evils."

"It didn't seem like that at the time."

He put his hands on his long legs, splayed out spiderlike. "This room is like my coffin. At first I could not come in here at all, then, I stood in the doorway for a time, entered little by little. They left me no candle to relieve the darkness, only the faintest glow from the hallway came in through those bars. There were days when the coal-gas was interrupted, and I sat in total blackness. It took months of coming day after day, but I finally entered and sat right where you see me now."

"Your coffin. It's the same, isn't it?"

"You learn quickly, when you listen. Why did you go to Perros?"

I shook my head, confused. "To pay my father respects. Because it was my religious duty."

"No," he said gently, voice silken, "that's what you told yourself, but the real reason is, you went to face his death. To see for yourself, over and over, what you hated the most."

It was like uncovering a wound, peeking under the bandage every hour or so to watch it seep. "So you want me to come in there with you."

"If you can," he said.

"This place is mad," I whispered. "It drives one mad."

He kept his hands on his knees, and I could hear him breathe. "Don't turn out the lantern," I begged.

He said nothing, just shook his head, no, I won't. I took a deep breath, bracing myself. Into the cell I crept, and the smell of earth and dust and Erik's musky, slightly sweaty scent filled the little room. Something swept through me, a sense of power that I couldn't explain, a chaos of the soul and flesh. I felt I could break a column if I wanted to, one of the wide stone pillars that held up the portico of this building. Suddenly I was aware of him as a body, as a man. All that morning, since waking, I felt echoes of him inside me, and at once I knew, not with the mind but in my skin, that he remembered the same. The thought came like an ambush, It's what it means to be one flesh. You feel the other person in your body, each remembering each.

The walls were rough in the yellow light, and near the chains dark spots marred the walls. Bloodstains, and that led me to wonder at how little blood I had shed under his body. He smelled very strong, but not unpleasant, rather like a horse at the end of a hot long ride. Yet underground it was always cool, and while lengthy, the walk to the dungeons had not been strenuous. It was something different, something which rose off of him like steam. I recalled the sharp, sweet, chemical smell of our first meeting in the flesh, and had called it the smell of death. This was different. Warm, rich, out of the earth itself, it was the opposite. It was the smell of life.

Papa had bought a half-acre from a neighbor, one that had never been plowed. The neighbor hadn't wanted to plow it before, but now he needed the money and couldn't wait for the land to produce anything. Thick grass ran roots deep under the tough and clay-like ground. Papa dug the tip of the plow in, and it barely penetrated. He called the draft horse to start, and as she pulled forward, the plow slipped. In it he pressed again, while I sat on a stump and watched. Again, and again, until the sharp blade slid beneath the earth and slowly, laboriously, the great Norwegian draft pulled it through.

"The earth screams when she is first rent," Papa said, after he had finished the initial long row and paused to rest, sweating and exhausted. When he came into the kitchen, his work shirt clinging to his back, my mother looked up at him with something in her eyes that I didn't understand.

Now I did.

I shivered. The sense of power grew stronger. We said nothing for what seemed a long time, not touching or speaking, that dark unknown life hanging between us like a rich fog. When I finally did speak, it was with the hushed tones you use in church, "It wasn't your worst fear, was it? The end to everything wasn't your worst terror."

His lips moved a little before he spoke. "No," he said with a dry-sounding throat. "It was that I would be lost in the black, and still know it. That the end to the body was not the end I believed in, upon which I so desperately relied. Sometimes in the bleak hollow of the night, when I woke at three in the morning and nothing moved, not even the blood in my veins, I imagined that after lying down in my coffin for the last time I would lie dead, buried, swallowed by it, and still somehow know, somehow would still remain conscious, buried alive for all eternity." In the lantern light his eyes shone like bright unflickering gold coins.

My whole body shook in one long tremor. My fear could be remedied by a light. Erik's, on the other hand, had no cure, for there was none for the death of the body. "What happened to the priest?" I asked, after a time.

"I never saw him again, after they pulled him out of the cell for the last time. No doubt they shot him."

"But you got out, eventually."

"Two men came to the cell door and opened it. They argued over their respective orders. It turned out that two factions of the Committee wanted me for different purposes. The first was to release me, to wire up a building to go off, that would be filled with hostages. They wanted to set clusters of these hostages up throughout the districts, and were counting on Thier not to pursue the occupation further, for fear of loss of civilian lives. The second, from a rival group, had been told to bring me to serve as one of those very hostages. 'He and his cell mate can have a reunion,' he smirked, and then my heart quickened, for I knew at that time the priest was still alive.

"A quarrel ensued and the two men ended up falling on each other instead, with their knives, grappling on the floor. The first cut the second's throat and then slipped in the blood, smacking his skull against the stone door frame. I managed to reach one of the knives they'd flung, and finished him off. Then I started to work, to get out of the chain that held my leg, and that took hours, although I worked as quickly as I could, spurred on with terror that someone else would come, or worse, that they wouldn't, and I would be left to die of thirst. But the leg shackle finally came off with a good deal of skin besides, and there I fled."

"You never found the priest."

"I didn't look. I went as far down into the bowels of the Opera as I could go, to niches no one knew about, not even most of the men who worked on this great structure. If Thiers and his men really were coming, I wasn't going to welcome them into Paris myself. And the Communards knew everything about this place, as many of them had drained the swamp it was built on, or raised the stones or scaffolding, or welded the great copper sheets to the roof. It was the craftsmen who made up the bulk of their ranks. Some of the men who imprisoned me, some who had argued for my freedom, both had been men of my own crews. It was pure panic, and no one could be trusted. Only Erik could trust himself. Later I found that the Commune had simply herded dozens of hostages together, and shot them all. It only made Thiers more brutal."

"I want to sit," I said, and he shifted over, leaving me room on the long stone block, moving as far from me as he could, and oddly, inexplicably, I felt a tiny twinge of hurt. "It's savage, horrible, and what's worse, it makes no sense."

"It was war, Christine." He sounded tired, tired and old. "Rarely does it make sense."

"So it was that shackle over there," and I pointed to the broken one limp and curled on the ground.

"That one."

"I saw them drag a man away, when we first came to Paris. They suspected him of being in the Commune. The Professor told me not to look."

"I was hiding like a fox gone to ground. Later I discovered that the last week of the occupation, the French Army had poured through Paris, and there was scarcely a working man or craftsman left who had not been singled out as a Communard supporter. On one afternoon alone they shot hundreds at Pere Lachaise Cemetery, then dumped them into trenches and covered them with earth."

"No prayers, I'm sure." I said, almost unable to speak with the enormity of it.

His cold voice rang off the walls. "This is the Third Republic of which we speak."

"So that is why you live down here. Had you ventured out, they would have found you and killed you. _La Revanche_, the posters screamed, when Papa and the Valeriuses and I first moved to Paris. Everyone wanted revenge."

He nodded as he leaned his head against the stone behind him. The two lamps of his eyes winked out with sudden exhaustion.

"Sing with me," I said softly. Never had I asked him to join his voice with mine before. Until now, it had always been him, giving me instruction or comment or criticism, picking the material, directing my voice. But now it was I who made the request. "Sing the _Regina Coeli_ with me. For that priest. For all of them."

"Not the Mozart," he said, eyes still closed.

"No, of course not, not the Mozart." I wanted to smile, but it didn't seem fitting, so I suppressed it. "I know a chant," and I started, "_Regina coeli laetare, Alleluia,_" and in on the Alleluia he came with a strong countermelody, so that what started out a simple chant resounded in rich polyphonic harmony. We sang through it three times, each different, and on the final "_Ora pro nobis Deum_," he went off into his own Alleluia, over and over. In I joined with a harmony of my own, until the walls rang with sounds solemn and august, yet light as the dust that flicked and twinkled around the light.

Afterwards he opened his eyes, his expression almost soft. "After the priest left, I lay in this room, expecting to die. When he was there, he annoyed me, but alone, alone I thought I should go mad. He kept begging me to confess to him, but I would not. On the day they dragged him out of the cell, and Christine, I heard the bone snap in his arm as they pulled him around the corner of the door, and he still begged. When he was gone, I missed him, but they shot so many, even the Archbishop, and I am sure that he is long dead. Now I sit here with you," he sighed, and I had never seen him so ugly as in the yellow glow of the lantern that rested on the floor. No one's face is flattered when lit from below. We're meant to have light shine on us from above, otherwise the shadows are all wrong. Yet while Erik's face stretched upwards like a monstrous caricature, it was all suffused with adoration. "_Regina_," he breathed. "My _Regina_. My life."

A great surge of melancholic pity flooded me. I got up quickly, and picked the ruined fragment of chain off of the floor by the broken end which once trapped a human ankle. The sense of power which had flooded the room now changed to a wash of sorrow. Handing the chain to him, I said, "It's yours now. It can't hurt you anymore." It was smaller than I thought, and lighter. I had expected something great and heavy of iron, like in a true medieval dungeon, but this bond was small and made of light steel, bright and untarnished even under its thick coating of cobwebby dust. He must have forced the knife into the narrow opening where the two pieces came together and broken the small spring holding it shut, for it still dangled out, useless.

Silently Erik took the shackle, holding it in his hands as if he had no idea what to do with it. Clearly, it had never occurred to him to simply pick it up, or cast it aside. He brushed it off and the dirt flew up, a million tiny sparks in the lantern light. Then he put it in his pocket and bowed his head solemnly.

"I think I know why you came back here so often," I said quietly, and those gold-reflected eyes turned towards me. "It reminds you of him. For you, he's still here."

Something played over his face for only a brief instant, then winked out like the candle he snuffed in my room last night. He shook his head in irritation and stood up, brushing the cobwebbed dust off of his coat. "I've had enough," he said, striding out ahead of me briskly, not looking back, and I hurried to avoid being left behind in the darkness.

The union of ape and angel, he had called it. At first I had thought he referred to himself as the ape, with me as the angel. Now from the vantage point of years I wonder, because it was within himself that the ape and angel warred until moments such as these, when together they joined in one voice, one spirit, one body. But like a reflection of that wicked, grinning moon which shines on the water, it holds its integral shape only for a moment, for when the next breeze comes along the image once again wavers and breaks into pieces. So the ape and angel came together, only to separate once more.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Erik must have written to Margot, for when I returned to the apartment, a cot had been set up in Mama Valerius's large room, the brightest and most sunlit of the apartment. Mama greeted me as if I hadn't been gone at all, and resumed crocheting some kind of trim. As long as the crochet pattern was simple and repetitious, and she didn't have to count but could simply observe the stitches, she could produce lacy edging which she then basted onto petticoats or pillowcases. It made me happy and eased a sizable portion of guilt as well, to watch her so busily occupied, and I prayed that her mind's progressive failure would spare the use of her hands as long as possible.

Margot's things were neatly arranged in Mama's mostly-empty wardrobe. Our maid Adèle lived in a small room, almost a closet, really, on the top floor of our apartment building, but Erik instructed that Margot was to stay in the apartment with Mama and I, to save me any nighttime disturbances. I didn't like Margot's sly, wise glances, and was especially glad that she wasn't at home on this afternoon of my return. She had gone marketing, Adèle said, and would not return for some time, as her list was apparently extensive.

"I want to thank you too, Mam'selle, for the tip," the sandy-haired girl said as she gave a deep curtsy. I hadn't the faintest notion what she meant. Then a moment later I knew – it must have come from Margot. Erik has been giving her money, and quite generously, too. It never occurred to me then to ask how much was she skimming off for herself.

Free of Margot's boots and shawls and aprons, my small, cramped room was unencumbered once more. I touched all of my familiar things, then checked my jewelry box. Brooch and earrings and chains were all there. My own armoire was small, with a cracked door. Its wood was chipped and faded, not like the glossy flame of the cherry-colored wood in Erik's rooms. Mine now too, I told myself, without really believing it.

Absently, from the bottom of the armoire I drew a box with my bobbins, thread, and lace-making pillow. On the pillow I had worked out the underlying mesh in the shape of a curved oak leaf, with three plump acorns beneath it. It was purely a decorative design, entirely useless, and I hid it guiltily, not wanting anyone to see what a frivolous time-waster I was. It couldn't be used to trim a petticoat or handkerchief, but something about the curved round lobes of the leaf appealed to me. Perhaps I could sew it into the front of a chemise, and thus justify the time spent. The lacework drew me in with simple rhythm, in time with the click of the bobbins and the weave of the threads through the warp of the mesh. Soon I would have to go back to the Opera to rehearse, but better to forget about that for the time being.

I didn't really want to sit with Mama, but as her room had more light, I moved in there. She at least would not chide me for making something so useless. Absorbed in her own craft, she scarcely noticed my presence. As I worked, the passage of time revealed itself in the slow emergence of texture and form out of the shapeless threads, and that fleeting time slid by painlessly. I sighed in contentment.

As if from far away, I heard Adèle's small thin voice at the door. "No, Monsieur, she is to see no one. I'm not supposed to let you in," and then, in a rush of skirts and apron, Adèle stood at the bedroom entrance, bristling. "I told him, Mam'selle, but he wouldn't listen ... Margot said she had to be here if you had a gentleman caller... and over her small shoulders and slight frame stood Raoul's blond head, his face flushed, his eyes full of blue sparks.

Now that he'd come in the apartment, he looked around awkwardly, suddenly embarrassed. "She said you were here. I apologize for the intrusion, but I had to see you. Please don't make me leave."

The maid stood in front of the doorway, arms outstretched. "You really cannot come in here, Monsieur," although if he had wanted to, he could have brushed her easily aside.

"Adèle, it's all right," I said, slowly getting up.

Mama looked at Raoul with interest and put down her crocheting, squinting her eyes as if she didn't recognize him. "Your cheeks are pink, young man. Is it cold outside?"

Raoul started to stammer, astonished at the situation – a tiny maid blocking the door to Mama Valerius's bedroom, and Mama asking him casually if he were cold. I put my hand on Adèle's shoulder, to reassure her. "It's fine, Adèle. Go bring us some tea. Monsieur le Vicomte can come into the bedroom."

Indignant, Adèle gave Raoul one last hard look before bustling off. He reached his hands out to me and before I knew it, both of mine were wrapped up in his, his in mine, mine in his, it was hard to say which. I thought his hands would be soft, but instead they were covered with old callouses on the palm, of course, from on board ship. He's a junior officer, he works too. The skin under the roughness and in between the fingers was soft, a little cool from the outdoors, a bit damp probably from nerves. Our hands had a little conversation all of their own as his fingers sought mine, caressing the fingertips, he warming his on my palms.

He gripped me tightly. I couldn't look at his face, though, and stared firmly at his cream-silk ascot, in which was stuck a small glittering stickpin. But I knew he looked at me, and from his soft fast breathing, knew how glad he was to see me. He smelled cold and fresh, a little salty.

"Christine," he said soft and low. "I didn't think you would be here. I almost didn't come at all. It was just a feeling, a crazy whim, to come by the apartment. I can't even explain it, and then when the maid said I couldn't see you, all I could think was, you were here. God in heaven, she's here, and not gone for good, not disappeared forever."

"Gone for good?" Mama echoed. "Where is Christine going?"

Raoul almost said something, but then stopped. First his palms, then his whole body tensed. He had found and felt the ring. "Dear God," he said, "What's this?"

I pulled my hands away sharply. "Nothing. It's not your concern."

His eyes flashed wildly. He wanted to seize those digits at once, I knew it, but his face stiffened and he controlled himself. "You got this last night, didn't you?"

Not exactly. "It was very recent, yes."

"He gave it to you! What does this mean?"

"It's a present!" Mama Valerius offered in a bright, cheerful tone. "Christine told me herself."

He ran his hand over his face. "Yes, that kind of ring is usually a present, Madame Valerius. I suppose this is with your permission."

"Of course," she said. "Christine has told me everything."

I couldn't see my face, but I knew it had to be white with panic. The blood left my arms and legs, and they started to tingle as if lace needles were being stabbed into them. "Mama, this is private. It's not to be discussed in front of Monsieur de Chagny. I'm sure he has no interest whatever in these personal matters."

"On the contrary. I find these personal matters fascinating. For instance, it's painfully clear now that you certainly are not free to marry."

I need some time, I thought. Just a minute of time. Breathing deeply, I said, "Don't speak to me of marriage. What place can a discussion of marriage possibly have between us? Anyway, I'm not free to marry."

"That's right," Mama chirped in again. "Her Angel of Music has forbidden it."

"Really," said Raoul as he leaned over Mama Valerius intently. "Tell us again about this Angel, Madame."

"Mama," I interrupted, "we've been over this. There is no Angel. There is a man, and yes, he has given me this ring. Yes, it was a present, and I am not your wife, Monsieur de Chagny, and so therefore do not need to give an accounting to you of who gives me presents, or what kind."

"Obviously," Raoul sniffed, the warmth in his manner almost gone now. "We established this in our conversation last night, that you were a free woman, bound only to your own desires."

"Only a husband has the right to ask me these questions."

"Most assuredly. And since you're obviously no longer free, that husband will never be me."

Mama leaned over and said loudly, "Are you making a proposal, Monsieur?"

Raoul lost whatever calm he'd managed to collect. Bright red now, he sputtered, "No, why would you say that, whatever do you mean?"

In one of those increasingly rare moments of sharpness, Mama said to him, "Well, then, Monsieur, what _are_ you here for?"

I joined her sharp gaze. "What indeed? If marriage isn't your aim."

He ignored me and directed his comments to Mama. "I am here because last night I saw something extraordinary, something that made me fear not only for Christine's safety, but for the state of her soul as well. Worthy Madame Valerius, if you care for Christine as a daughter, which I know you do, I appeal to you to demand the name of the man who gives her expensive rings, who takes her away for weeks at a time. For with him is certainly where she has been, and he has even offered, so she said to me, to take her off the stage and presumably support her in comfort. That would be bad enough, Madame, but there is something more dangerous, something far worse."

Mama clutched her throat and called out, "Monsieur, you frighten me. Don't frighten me like that. What danger is Christine in? I know she has left me, but she has come back. Now she won't go away again, will you, Christine?" I said nothing and couldn't meet her eye. Wildly she looked from Raoul to myself. "What is this danger?"

I sat next to her, shooting arrows of dislike at Raoul. As I held her in my arms, soothing her and stroking her hair, the maid came to the door. Tea would be served in the drawing room, and then she caught my glare, and backed hastily out. "Don't leave me, Christine," Mama sobbed.

"I think she would like that reassurance," Raoul said coldly.

Ignoring him, I whispered low to Mama, "You know that daughters leave their mothers." She sniffed a little, and I went on. "I'm not in danger, Mama. It's going to be all right. You will be taken care of, I have that on a solemn promise. I'll visit."

"What are you saying, Christine?" Raoul asked, cold turning to hot. "Madame Valerius, this man, this man whose name Christine will not even tell her guardian, this man," and he spit the words out, "he is definitely no angel, but more like a devil, a devil of enchantment. You say he has given Christine lessons for three months. I cannot imagine what kind of lessons these would be, except in sorcery, because I have heard him sing, Madame, and there is no sound on earth like it. My brother is far more of a man of the world than I, Madame, but although I am young, I am no stranger to fine music. He has taken me to _La Scala_ and to Vienna, as well as our own National Opera. Never have I heard sounds so compelling, so seductive come from a human throat. Had I not prayed, had I not used every scrap of will I possessed, that voice would have seduced me as well. I would have followed it anywhere, into God knows what kind of pit. If enough people could hear it, a voice like that could compel the world and draw it into what sort of devilry I dare not imagine."

"You heard him sing?" I said, icily incredulous. "How? Where?"

"I did," and he pushed past me, suddenly concerned for Mama. "Are you all right, Madame? You're very white. Can you breathe?"

She took a few deep whistling breaths, and then started to cry again. "This talk of devils, it frightens me. Christine, what is he talking about? I don't understand. You told me your angel was kind. You said that he told you he talked with your Papa often, that he said your papa was happy. How could a devil say that?"

"He talked to Monsieur Daaé," Raoul stated baldly, and his cold fury frightened me a little. "Why am I not surprised?"

Mama looked at me, like a little child. The sharp questioning had disappeared. She was helpless and bewildered. "Who is he, Christine?"

"Tell us," Raoul repeated. "Tell this good woman, who has made every sacrifice for you, who cares about you as if you were her own flesh and blood. And you might tell me as well, because I fear this conniving seduction is making a fool of you."

"You are calling me a fool? Who is the fool, if you would waste your afternoon visiting one?"

"Christine," he said, pausing. "No, you are not a fool. But you are behaving recklessly. You do not know men. You don't know the depths to which men will go."

Oh, did I not? You are the naive one, Raoul de Chagny. I know man in my flesh now, and everything has changed. "I will tell you nothing, until you tell me how you happened to hear him sing. Were you listening at the door of my dressing room again, your ear to the keyhole? Did you peek through as well, hoping to catch a glimpse?"

His eyes flashed wild, blue fire. Oh no, I thought, I've gone too far. "I'll tell you how I know," he snapped, ice breaking off into the ocean. "I was there, in your dressing room."

"What?" I gave a small shriek, and Mama looked surprised. "Monsieur," she said reproachfully.

He looked embarrassed now, but still angry. "I couldn't let you leave, the way we parted. Yes, it was my fault. I am willing to take the entire blame on myself. I said harsh things which never should have passed my lips. It was crude and undignified, for I felt provoked, jealous. Do you understand how I could feel jealous, Christine? Is that even possible in the glacier which has grown in the space that used to house a kind and tender heart? I went down to your dressing room, thinking you would change before going home, or at least I hoped you would go home ... no, I won't bring that up again. Whether you went home last night or not, it's not for me to ask."

"She didn't," Mama Valerius said calmly.

He looked away, a trace of tears in his eyes as he struggled to keep them in. "Never mind, Madame, it's not my concern, as Christine has told me repeatedly. I only wanted to say farewell to you in a kinder way, but when I got to your room and found it empty, I hid. Don't look at me that way, I know it was the act of a coward. But there I remained, concealed behind your curtain until that uncanny serenade began. At first I could barely make it out, and I have heard that aria so many times, but no one, no one on earth sings it that way. All you have to admit is that he mesmerized you, enchanted you, and that you were beyond your own control, and no one, least of all me, will hold responsible. As I said, that music could cast a spell of passion on anyone. You are a girl, naive and vulnerable. Tell me who he is, Christine. I want to hear you say his name, and I want an accounting from him."

"He owes you no accounting," I said coldly. "And from me you will never hear his name."

"Christine is a good girl," Mama Valerius inserted. "She has always been brought up in the true religion. She was one of the first children in Sweden to be baptized after the King changed the law. She would not love a devil."

A brief image, a candle pinched out as the room went to utter black, my scream in the night. Not a devil, not an angel, just a man. Just Erik, and I sighed. "Whomever I love or don't love, I don't choose to discuss it."

"That's right," said Mama. "She doesn't want to."

Raoul's face softened, and two of the tears he'd been holding back trickled down either side of his long, thin nose.

"You do love him," he said softly. "Why can you not simply admit it? Why must you hide? I asked you last night, why go through with this farce? Does this man demand it? Why would Erik demand this of you?"

I staggered as if he had struck me. Mama asked, bewildered, "Who is Erik?" I couldn't speak. It was as if Erik had slammed me in the stomach again, as he had on the night after we had seen Raoul in the Bois. The room began to turn faintly green, and I slumped to the bed.

"Erik is that man's name," Raoul said to Mama.

I rested my head on my knees, and the green darkness passed.

"But who is he?" Mama repeated.

"Ask Christine, Madame," he said. "Her Angel of Music, that fraud, is named Erik. It is easy to see why she thought he was more than a man, for even the angels would clamber over broken boulders to hear that voice." He said the last almost tenderly, as if Erik's song had touched something deep inside him as well. I still buried my face in my lap, afraid and ashamed to look at him. Why does a name have so much power? Erik wasn't his real name. Even I didn't know the true one. A priest had sprinkled water on him, said the words, but that name Erik would never tell me. And yet to hear even his alias, to hear it spoken from the lips of someone else, made something collapse and die inside of me entirely. As long as no one else knew my shame, knew my secrets, I could pretend they were concealed from the world. But the first of them had been dragged out. What else would follow?

The children used to play hide and seek like that, a foot or frock sticking out from behind a curtain or couch. They were so easy to find, the little mites, because they believed as long as they themselves were hiding, you would never find them. If they thought themselves invisible, certainly they must be. If Erik remained unnamed, he was mine, and not subject to any normal human scrutiny. That was how he liked it, so deep below. But now someone had come along, someone who named him.

Something broke inside of me. There's something broken in me, I thought wildly, my face still hid in my lap like a child playing a hiding game. Raoul has broken it, because he's discovered Erik's name. Suddenly a wave of fear swept over me, as the realization pummeled me.

"You were there," I whispered, looking up at his anguished face. "Do you want to die? Because he will surely kill you if he suspects you were there."

"It feels as if I have died already," he said softly, and the two of us hung onto each other's words as if suspended in the air momentarily.

"Mam'selle," the maid called, "Shall I still hold that tea?"

"Yes," I said, keeping my eyes on Raoul. "Will you stay and have some?"

He wiped his own wet ones, recovering himself. "I don't wish to trouble you, or Madame Valerius. I've taken enough of your afternoon with my unwelcome attentions."

"I want you to stay," I said softly, now afraid for the first time that he would really go.

Mama looked baffled. "Are you sure that's all right, Christine? You told me that your Angel warned you against special friendships and worldly attachments."

"That was when he was an angel, Mama," I said, suddenly tired, the thin thread of headache pulling itself over my scalp like lace threads of wire weaving in and out of the skin. "Now he's a man, and it's all right."

She made some small noises and went back to her crocheting, ignoring us.

In the drawing room I poured out for him, and offered him some almond _biscotti_. Our cups went cold and untouched as he held my hands, just resting them in his. "So you're promised to this Erik," he said. I started to pull my hands away, and he called out softly, "No, please, don't do this to me. It's torture to think of it."

"What can I tell you? Forget him. It is a terrible knowledge I have, and you cannot share it."

"I want to share it," he said. "If you have a burden on you, I want to help you bear it. But I can do nothing if you won't speak to me, if you won't tell me."

"If you want to help me, don't come to my dressing room like that, completely by surprise. Or you may have a surprise you didn't expect."

He snorted a little, but composed his face for fear I would withdraw my hands from his.

"Are you really promised?" he asked.

"I can't marry, if that's what you mean. Please, don't ask me anymore right now." Don't make me lie to you, I thought. If you just don't ask, then I won't have to lie.

"Nuns wear wedding rings," he said strangely. "Are you saying you are some kind of nun, some sister consecrated to music?" and he laughed without humor.

"Raoul, please ..." I begged. The desire for knowledge, and the desire to keep my palms warm within his own warred within him. To hold even the tips of my fingers won out, and he sat content to stroke them, trying as best he could to ignore that outsized ring.

"Will I ever see you again?" he sighed, as all his bravado collapsed.

"Yes," I whispered. "In my dressing room. Come tomorrow in the late afternoon, at teatime. But please, please don't come unless we have made an arrangement, or I've written you first. The worst you could do is visit unannounced."

He stared as if he'd unearthed a bag of gold in the middle of a potato field. "You can't mean that. You'll see me, tomorrow?" Then his face grew hard, as if a sudden impression had come to mind. "I see. So that is where you have your rendezvous. Of course it would be ... awkward. I thoroughly understand."

"It's not like that! You understand nothing!" I protested. "If you insist on thinking the worst of me, I shall uninvite you entirely."

With an indignant expression he pulled his hands away and gripped his thighs, hard, the knuckles of his fingers whitening. "What happened to the girl I met in Perros, who rounded on me wildly at the mere suggestion that she had a man in her room? 'I do not shut myself up in my dressing room with men,' I recall you saying. Now you shut yourself up with two of them."

"He has never been inside my dressing room," I said stiffly. "Perhaps you should not come at all, then."

"No, I want to. That's the terrible thing, I want to, and yet I don't. Erik has enchanted you, and through you, enchanted me as well! Everything I should not want, I do, I hate myself, and then I want it the more."

"Don't speak his name," I whispered. "Please, Raoul, I beg you. Don't invoke it. Pretend you have never heard it. It will only bring you misery, and it tears out my heart besides."

He leaned over me as close as he could, but when I reached for his fingers to squeeze them tenderly, he waved me away. "I am serious, Christine. I cannot bear it if you touch me."

Anguish surged through me. "You're right. I am everything you say I am."

"No!" he retorted. "That's not it. Don't take harsh words of jealousy to heart. I can't bear to have your hand in mine, because I know you are going to withdraw it. That ring is only on one finger, but every other finger is bound by it as well. If you touch my hand ... Don't. Please, just don't."

Abashed, afraid, I sank down very small into my seat. "I understand."

"But this I must say, I sincerely thought after last night I was never to see your face again. I thought without doubt that this morning you would be on a train, in a coach lined with velvet, bound for some city unknown. And yet here you are." He shrugged as if to say, what do I do with you now?

Smiling faintly I said, "Since I am to sing _La Juive_ in a little over a week, I'd better not go anywhere."

His confusion reminded me of Mama Valerius. "All right. I won't ask. It wouldn't matter anyway, because the answer would vary from one hour to the next. Tomorrow, then, and I will count every second. I trust you will be there, because you showed yourself reliable when you kept our rendezvous at the Masked Ball." Then he stood and reached for my hands.

Baffled, I offered them. "I thought you didn't want me to take your hands in mine."

"You drag me down into madness," he whispered, and pressed my fingers up against his breast so that they sank into the soft velveteen of his afternoon vest. I stroked it absently, the fabric so soft, the flesh so pliant through the fabric, and a little hum of pleasure moved through me. Then at once I thought, I am disgusting, I have no right, and I dropped away abruptly. "No, no," he murmured, "Come back, little hands," and he tried to bring them up once more, but I hesitated. He sighed and kissed my right one, lingering a long time on the back, sweeping it with his moustache.

Then he flung away from me. "You're right. Everything I say, I do the opposite. You have taken me and turned me inside out. Do you see how long that vow lasted? Not a minute. But I am done with this vacillation. Tonight I pray for fortitude, because I cannot spend my life peering through the fence into a garden I'll never enter."

I sighed, standing there in the slanting twilight, not knowing what to do with my hands or my heart. "You're right. It's better not to. I won't put you to the test again." Three months earlier, I thought. Why couldn't you have returned three months earlier?

"Do you still want me to come?" he implored, and I nodded, wondering if I would ever feel his silky grasp again.

He picked up his hat and bowed courteously to me in a motion simple and precise and sweeping all at once. "Then I shall. Tomorrow, then," he said, and was gone.

I went to the window and watched him turn down the street to the right, fearing that some catastrophe might drop out of the sky on him at any second. Then, I happened to glance up the street, and from the opposite direction of Raoul's departure came Margot, laden with packages. As Raoul crossed the road, she stopped and scrutinized him momentarily, then started her slow, lumbering pace again. She couldn't recognize him, I thought. She's never seen him. At least, I hoped not.

(_continued_...)


	17. The Unsafe Heart

**The Unsafe Heart**

**A/N: **_In French, the formal 'you' ("vous") is used between people who don't know each other well, or by someone of lower station to one in the higher. The informal 'you' ("tu") is used between intimates._

The Cotillion is a quiet hotel with rooms obscenely pink and white and gilt. My bed has a canopy of pale rosy gauze more suited to a girl of ten, and the precious delicacy of the imitation Régence furniture overwhelms me. Nonetheless it's safe, quiet, and full of widows or English spinsters on holiday. They stay in their rooms in the evening, or bring their needlework to the salon downstairs, to chat and drink cordial.

I've glimpsed a few matrons from the provinces, too, with their willowy coming-of-age daughters, for whom the dressmakers at home will not do. They must have fittings in Paris, and search the grand department stores for their gloves and shawls and veils. Their mothers either beam at their juvenile marriageable prettiness, or look bleakly downward when their daughters are not looking, as the mothers add up the cost and the aggravation.

Martine insisted that she be presented at a grand ball held by one of the minor duchesses associated with our parish. When I asked her, What for? she turned on me, furious with fresh sixteen-year old indignation. Because I won't be a shopgirl, she railed. If I am to meet a man of quality, I must be presented properly. So we prepared, although a Brussels dressmaker was good enough, and Martine got her long white dress with the slim white leather gloves, and a kiss on her hand from the Archbishop besides. No Flemish was spoken at that party. Martine piled her long blonde hair up underneath a laden tiara, and danced, and for an evening was happy.

Since it is August, even the chatter of middle-aged women is interrupted by long stretches of silence. The windows are open to the evening breeze, surprising for this season. A vast wind from the sea so many kilometers away has swept over all of Île-de-France, bringing with it relief from the heat and smell and turbid atmosphere. Today I took a step towards the edge of the cliff, and came back whole. It is a heady feeling.

When I had almost finished dressing and was about to ring for a cab to visit Martynière, the note came by way of her personal servant. She had strained her back and was obliged to rest in bed, and she couldn't think of imposing upon me to visit her in such a state. I sighed, folding the letter. To visit a sick aunt by marriage to me seemed a normal and natural thing, but Martynière must keep up appearances. It would make her feel weak, and embarrassed, and me too much like a hired nursemaid.

I was hardly looking forward to seeing Martynière. Her self-effacing behavior annoyed me, not because of her neglect of Raoul and me and the children (a neglect I had come to expect from the de Chagnys), but because she seemed so conflicted about it. It was clear that she wanted the _rapprochement _her own late husband vigorously opposed, but timidly refused to bring one about.

At the same time, her letter annoyed me because it left me free for lunch, a lunch that I had been obliged to refuse the foxy-red M. Peillard. It occurred to me to write him, but I stopped myself. He's made other plans. It would look forward, perhaps even a little desperate. His secretary would read it, and a thousand other objections rose up as well. Best to let him rest until tomorrow.

So here I was with a day in Paris, and no idea what to do with it. Philippe was no doubt at the medical school and would lunch with his colleagues. I could find some other woman at the hotel without a companion, and ask her to join me for part of the day. But that seemed repugnant. As always, when in Paris, my mind returned to the beating pulse of the city, the pulse that would always throb inside of me, the throbbing beat which originated from that tomb I could never visit, the sight I looked away from whenever Raoul and I happened to pass it in the carriage.

The National Opera. I didn't have to see it to feel it like a body in the room with me, a body in the dark. Then a fierce desire rose up to see it again, and not just in passing from a carriage window. To go directly up to it (even if I could not go inside), to gaze upon its granite face. To no longer fear it, even if it was a tomb, even if inside it resided one body, now two that I knew of, and merciful God, perhaps even more.

I finished dressing, left the Cotillion in its quiet neighborhood on the western edge of the Marais, and walked up the Rue-aux-Ours towards the Avenue-de-l'Opera. The shops and kiosks went by in a blur. As I turned onto the Avenue itself and saw the great structure looming at the end, it took all my resolve not to turn back. I felt peculiarly vulnerable walking along, without the protection of leather and metal. Too, the street seemed wilder and more chaotic as the few horse-drawn carriages were outnumbered by the horseless variety, with their smells and noises, instead of the sweet low clopping.

Crowds filled the Plaza, men with drapes over their heads peering into tripod-mounted cameras, groups of women with elaborate hats walking arm in arm, chatting animatedly, governesses with children not on holiday, men from Asia in long robes, whose turbans gleamed white. I felt faint, although the day was not uncomfortably warm. As I walked I had toyed with the idea of going inside, perhaps even purchasing a ticket for a matinee performance, although I wondered if I could stay in the auditorium. All the statuary, the gilt, the bronze, the glowing colors of frescoes, all seemed like a mere covering for the deep stagnant darkness beneath, and I knew that if I went into that vast corpselike edifice, it would be to descend once again as deeply and darkly as I could.

But here I was, and my legs shook. There was a cafe table open at the restaurant directly opposite the Plaza, and I dived for it as if it were a life raft thrown to me in the middle of a maelstrom. Trembling, I barely noticed how long it took the waiter to approach me, so grateful was I to simply sit. People walked up the steps of the National Opera like suppliants entering a temple. The same bright god presided over the rooftop, golden against the copper roof now so shockingly green. Apollo on the roof, with the flayed Marsyas in the basement, I thought, and the sadness pierced me.

No waiter came, but I continued to sit. The building seemed to mock me, taunting me with my own fear. Is it him dead you fear, it said, or him alive? But I know better than that, I answered the building back. I felt his last breath in my ear. Yet why does it feel as if he still lives, when I look at you, you stone and metal gargoyle spewing a flood of water and blood from the past?

Because he's in my bones, the building laughed. His bones are my bones. He raised my bones from the muck beneath. His hand is on me, yes, diluted by the impression of so many other hands, but still those unique hands rest on my flanks, and my flanks still tremble at the memory of how he set girder to girder and block upon block. He left a little of his blood, even. You didn't know that? Every man does, even if the stone scratches him only slightly. As long as I stand here so will he, because he and I are bone of the same bone, blood of the same body.

"Madame? Excuse me, Madame?"

Shocked, I turned away from that grinning stone face, to see a young one with pert nose and sweet curved mouth set in a small pout. His gingery curls ruffled a little in the breeze that had sprung up. "I assume Madame would like to order?" Barely polite, he stared at the woman clad in widow-black, as if annoyed that I took up an entire table.

I met his stare, thinking of Erik's blood lying at the bottom of a pit dug out of the earth, a little water seeping in, seeing the rasp across his arm, or hand, or cheek, where perhaps he showed a worker how it was to be done, the slip of a tool that followed, or the ill-timed action of a hand. Something must have shone out of my eyes, for the young waiter looked away. When he brought me something cold and chocolate, with a splash of crème de menthe, he didn't look at me at all. I spooned at the brown foam and sat there until the lunch hour began.

Motorcars circled the Plaza, and I dodged them. There was no one in line at the ticket window, and I pulled out some franc notes for the early performance of Richard Strauss's _Salome_. No one stopped me as I slipped in a side door on the Rue Auber. The corridor was dim and smelled of floor-wax. I went down the stairs and headed as if mesmerized towards my old dressing room, but the corridor that led to it had been blocked off, covered by a smooth expanse of wall. Confused, I looked around, and when a rough old stagehand demanded to know what I wanted there, I apologized quickly and went back out to the street.

Around the building going clockwise was the Rue Scribe. Where was it, the archway under which I'd sheltered, the secret passage into the stone body through which I crept, and where I emerged one last time a newborn creature blinking in the sun, newborn into life because Erik was dead, and had died bringing me into being? The entrance was bricked up, and I stood transfixed with sorrow, as if the building didn't want me anymore, as if it had spat me out of its granite mouth for being neither hot nor cold. I put my hand on the mortar, thinking, it's still relatively fresh. They've put this up within the past few years, perhaps even a year.

A rustle next to me, a slight male cough. One of the opera's security men stood by me, quietly. "Is there anything you need, Madame?" and his voice was kind.

"Don't chase me away," I said, almost crying now with sorrow. It would have been so much easier had he been rough, ordered me to wait in the lobby.

"They said a woman was in the costume wing, who looked lost. Said you were in black, with a veil on your hat, and asked me to see what was up."

It's nothing, I started to say, but decided not to. He was about Philippe's age, and the brass buttons on his vest were shiny. "Someone I knew died here. A long time ago. I've been away from Paris, and now I've come back for a visit. I just wanted to see it."

"Died here?" he asked, a little alarmed.

"You were just a small boy, or perhaps not even born. It was that long ago."

"During a performance? There are a lot of uncanny stories about this place."

"During his last performance, on a stage of his own making."

"An actor, then? I've heard stories, but not that one."

"There are many," I murmured. "You would have to work here far longer to hear them all."

He shrugged, probably hoping whatever afflicted me wouldn't rub off on him. "You have to understand, Madame, why it's been newly bricked up. You know about the skeleton, I take it. The newspapers couldn't leave it alone, about that skeleton. You'd be amazed how many come here, want to see where it was buried, always looking for a way in. Upstairs, they're not in too good a humor about it. There are a lot of curiosity seekers who buy a ticket and then want to roam around."

"I imagine so," I said. "But I'm not here for curiosity."

"If you have a ticket, Madame, I think I'll ask you to wait in the lobby, rather than out here."

"Are you married?" I asked.

"What?" and he looked surprised. "Not even a year yet," and he blushed, his eyes suddenly very blue against the pink. "Does it show?"

"I wondered if your wife would like to see the performance," I said, and handed him my ticket. "Perhaps she would enjoy it."

"That she might. I talk about what I hear at work off and on, and she sighs, wanting to go. But I still can't let you in," he said, his eyes warm but his lips thin.

"I wouldn't think to ask. Please, take it. I've found what I've come here for, anyway."

I left him standing on the Rue Scribe, holding the ticket in his hand. He put it in his pocket and patted the front of his uniform jacket like it was the hand of his wife, and he wanted to cement her affection.

Tired, I headed for the Boulevard Hausmann, hoping to catch a tram or motor-driven bus. As I waited on the corner, I looked back at the Garnier Opera. Janus-faced, it seemed to stare at me as penetratingly from behind as from the front. You thought you could come in, it mocked. Foolish woman, thinking you could enter through the same door all the time, as if it would open to you whenever you asked. Go, its cold blank windows said. You'll have to find another way in, but not through me. You carry his grave inside yourself. Find it there.

Two tombs. One lies in a Brussels churchyard, where the climbing rose I planted this spring twines around its trellis like arms. Its white blossoms hung heavy and fragrant until the sun beat them down, and I took some of them to make into a sachet. The other stands before me. One tomb is small, one is vast, one is known to the world, one held in my heart, a dusky secret. I know which one I will lie beside, some day.

The breeze blows through my wedding-cake of a hotel room, scattering my papers, riding in on the wings of the sea.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

The next day when I arrived late to my _loge_, Raoul was already pacing the hallway. There were no windows in the corridor that tunnelled through the very center of the theater building. As it was mid-morning and most of the company were not yet up and about, the gaslights sputtered low. Little glittering speckles of dust flew up from the carpet where he walked. He was so preoccupied he didn't even notice me almost upon him.

"Come in, quickly. Don't linger about in the corridor like that."

He fought to control his face, composing it patiently into the bland look a father gives a fanciful child when he is tired of her lies, but somehow has not the heart to make her stop. "If you say so. I thought you weren't coming." He removed his hat, but didn't take my hand. I didn't need to touch him to feel the warmth of his body, the cold struggle of his reserve.

"I apologize, Monsieur le Vicomte. M. Richard wanted to see me, to make sure I was ready to get back to work. Then I had to go visit the costumer, to get measured and fitted for the upcoming productions." She had fussed and grumbled, pulling in darts and sticking me with pins, complaining, I'll have to cut everything down as Carlotta was twice your size, how can I fit this on you, it hangs like a feedbag, you have no shoulders to work with, an ironing board has more shape, and so on. "Please, sit," I said, and I brushed off the worn seat of my settee. It was dusty, and that embarrassed me. I took a small overstuffed chair opposite, as far from him as I could manage.

"No 'Monsieur,' no titles, please. You will forgive me for dispensing with the customary greeting." Raoul smiled faintly, ignoring the puffs of dust that rose when he sat.

"You will have to excuse the plainness of the setting," I apologized. "While the Opera Garnier is only six years old, the furnishings are ancient. A large variety theater went bankrupt, the _Metropolitan_, did you know it? They bought the furniture at a discount."

"Philippe used to go there often," and then he hesitated, turned a little pink. "One of the owners went to Dutch Guyana with most of the earnings, as I recall."

"That's the one. More chorus-line singers and dancers out of work than anyone could count." I rubbed the threadbare fabric of my own chair. "Everything's beautiful here in the Garnier on the surface, in the lobbies, but behind the scenes it's just everyday stuff. Not what you're used to, I'm sure."

"How do you know what I'm used to? Try sleeping in a hammock, in a hold with twenty other men for months at a time. It makes you appreciate the peace of a room like this, and anything with a little upholstery." He stretched a little as some of the tension left his shoulders. "What came of your meeting with M. Richard, then?"

"La Carlotta has left Paris. M. Richard told me she has gone to some kind of spa on the Mediterranean for her health. The shock of the chandelier, and that spasm in her throat. Singers do get it, he said."

"Will she be back?" Raoul asked.

"I don't know. I signed a short-term contract for two productions, _La Juive_ and _Faust_. They said they would see after that, when they counted the receipts. They're not happy about La Carlotta's leave; she was very popular. The doctors have found nothing wrong with her throat. She can sing perfectly well in rehearsal, yet when she even thinks of going on stage, it seizes shut. They wanted her to see a special doctor at the _Salp__êtrière_, someone named Charcot, who treats women for what they call 'hysteria.' She won't go because, as she says, the _Salp__êtrière _is for abandoned women and lunatics, she isn't either one, and won't set foot in the place. They're trying to persuade Dr. Charcot to visit her in her home. To make it worse, there's some kind of argument going on between M. Richard and M. Moncharmin as well. M. Moncharmin says that if it's hysteria, it's not a health condition and isn't covered under the terms of her contract, which means she's breaking it. M. Richard, on the other hand, said that if her throat didn't work and thus she was unable to sing, then that involved her health, regardless of the cause. Meanwhile, Carlotta stays at home and is said to be in a very bad temper."

Raoul's eyes glazed a little. Unlike Erik, he didn't seem to relish theater gossip. "Were you hoping for more than two productions?"

"I don't think they would even consider it. M. Richard was friendly enough, but when he asked me to give him a small audition, his eyes were cold. He couldn't complain about my voice, however. He complimented me, but almost resentfully. Later, I saw the girl who was my understudy leave his office, and it looked like she had been crying. I think he had just told her that the parts were no longer hers."

"Perhaps," he said softly, "you have an inkling of what it is like to be in Carlotta's place, having a lesser singer looking up at you, wondering if she will ever get her chance."

"What do you mean by that?" I cried, affronted. Was he saying that I was like Carlotta in any way?

Smoothing his hair, he said, "It's nothing. I'm glad you got the parts." He looked at his hands and squirmed a little on the settee, not finding a comfortable spot. "There's something else I wanted to say to you as well. It was out of turn for me to speak to you as I did yesterday, when I came to your home. But I can't help it, for you infuriate me, then I apologize, and you inflame me again." Silent, I twisted the ring loose on my finger, and he tried not to look at it. "You have to tell me, Christine. Are you going to marry?" He was like a farmer digging a well, if no water comes up the first time, he just keeps cranking deeper and deeper, until something springs out. "I have to know."

"I will not marry, Raoul," and invoking mental reservation said silently, because I already am. "I cannot marry anyone now."

"So you say," he said, fighting to keep the despair out of his voice. "Yet you sit here with me, privately, with no chaperone."

"We need no chaperone."

"Your reputation..." he began.

"I recall you saying, 'I thought you were a woman of honor,' with the clear implication that I was not.'"

"Christine, I didn't mean that... Stop throwing things back into my face."

"Yes," I said calmly, "You did mean it. I know I have no reputation. What I have is my art," and Erik, but I wouldn't speak that thought. "As far as what other people think, I can't concern myself. You are right, I have no honor, and so without my art, I'm nothing."

"That isn't true!" he protested.

"Tell me. What does your brother, the Comte de Chagny, really think of me?"

He looked down at his cuffs, and I saw the white flash of tiny diamonds. "He thinks you are a remarkable singer, one of the best in years."

"That's not all." I sat, waiting. When we didn't touch each other, everything was so clear. Mountain lake water ran through me instead of blood. "You know there's more."

Embarrassed, he didn't want to answer. "I believe he used the term 'opera wench.' And '_bagatelle_.'"

"And you agreed."

"Of course I did not!"

"But you didn't contradict him." This was so easy. All it took was being calm, implacable.

"One doesn't contradict Philippe. He has a habit of getting his way."

Not always, I thought, recalling Erik's mocking comments about the tragedy Sorelli had in store for him. "I think you've made your brother's opinions your own."

He sat up, hot. "What does it matter? Philippe should be the happiest man in Paris right now, because of that ring you wear."

"What? Don't tell me you plan to discuss what is purely my business with Philippe?"

"Of course not. Why should I? As you've said repeatedly, you are not free to marry. You won't admit to being engaged, but what other condition for a maiden could there be?" He saw my stiffening backbone, and feared I might bolt upright, so instead he tried to reassure me with soothing words. "Look, I can understand the vow not to marry. When she was Mademoiselle Martynière de Chagny, my sister believed the Holy Virgin called her to take vows as a Third Order Carmelite."

"To join a convent, then?" I asked.

"Surely you know what the third orders are," he said, and I shook my head. "That's true, you grew up in a schismatic country, even if you have lived in Paris for years. My sister would have lived at home, not in a convent, but she would have never married. Because she was not of age, she needed Father's permission, and he refused. Then two years later she agreed to the marriage Father and Uncle Auguste had arranged for her, and the whole subject became moot. But anyway, the point was to let you know that I do understand such a promise, even though it be not sanctioned officially by the Church, and do respect it. In that event, though, I don't understand why you would agree to meet me here alone."

"Because I wanted to see you. Because I want you to believe me. Anyway, he gave his permission. It's safe ... I think."

Suddenly Raoul's eyes grew wet, as if some enormous emotion surged up behind them, and could force itself out in only one way. "No, Christine, you are wrong. Hearts are never safe. Don't ever believe that. When you toss a man's heart about as if it were a toy and then it falls to the ground and shatters, be careful, because the shards can pierce you, and you will bleed."

Astonished, I stammered, "I'm not playing with anyone's heart. Anyway, why do we always have to turn back to this point?"

"Because it is the pivot on which the world turns. Is your heart that cold? What sliver of ice penetrated it?"

"Sliver of ice?" I said, confused.

"You've forgotten, then, haven't you? Do you remember when we were in Brittany that golden summer, and a storm blew in from the sea right in mid-afternoon? The women went to the old church there to pray, because the fishing boats had not yet come in. You wanted to stay at the church and listen to them, because they didn't pray the rosary quietly, the way we were taught. They wailed it out like wild women, tore at their clothes with their nails. As interesting as that was, I wouldn't let you risk getting chilled by that storm. Instead, I made you run back to the Valerius's cottage, and just as we opened the garden gate, the rain and hail poured down upon us.

"The sky was black and the thunder fierce. Professor Valerius insisted that I not try to walk back to the _pension _where my aunt would be waiting. I feared my aunt's anger, but your father, God rest him, explained. His French was so hesitant, yet in that lyric accent which sounded almost like singing itself, he said that she would be angrier if I got burnt up by lightning, or if a tree limb struck me. I remember your father's words clearly, to this day. 'She is afraid, yes. She can have her fear with a happy ending, or her fear with a tragic one. Either way, she will be afraid, so there is nothing for you to do but stay here until the storm blows over.' So there I remained with you for the long hours until it abated, and that was one of the happiest afternoons of my life.

"Your father lit a lamp, and to amuse us read to us the story of Gerda and her friend Kay, how one of the broken fragments of the goblin's mirror worked its way through Kay's eye, and then downwards into his heart, where it turned that soft organ, so warm with love of Gerda and all of the rest of life, into a lump of ice. Then, because his heart was so cold, Kay became the prey of the Snow Queen, that great fairy from the icy north who came and took him away in her sledge. Gerda, who loved him, resolved to set out and find him, until it took her to the northernmost end of the world, the 'ultima thule,' as the ancients called it."

His words took me back, as if to a half-remembered dream. "Of course. I remember it now. How could I have forgotten that afternoon? How could I forget that story? She found him, didn't she?"

"She did, but by that time they had grown up." He sat quietly, waiting for me to say something.

I didn't know how to show him how he had touched me. "I've had some tea sent up, which I hope is still warm. Then there's this half of a cake Margot sent."

"Of course," he sighed, as if he'd shot an arrow that had missed its mark. "Tea would be welcome. But who is Margot?" he asked, as I laid out tea things on the table and sliced the cake. It was moist and heavy, rich with almonds sprinkled on top, filled with almond paste.

"She's Mama Valerius's nursemaid, but she's been running our household since..." and there I stopped, confused, not wanting to mention my absence. "Never mind. She's become a sort of housekeeper."

"So she cares for Madame Valerius when you are ... gone," and he mouthed the words carefully.

The tea was still warm under its knit cover. "She does." Handing him the cup, I smiled. "Perhaps you'll drink this today."

"I don't know," he answered. "When I see you, I don't think of food or drink. There's too much to say, too much I want to tell you, and I can't get it all out. It's been so long, and I feel there's so little time. I leave in only a few weeks."

I swallowed, hard. Not many days. "No doubt you will be glad to have a peaceful life at sea, and not have to worry about me then."

"It's not exactly a peaceful life. Even though we embark in a few weeks, we spend some time up by Norway, provisioning. The glaciers are supposed to be enormous, great mountains of ice that glow blue from the sky behind them, and overshadow your ship. The moustache can freeze to a man's lip, or the eyelids freeze shut. Every maneuver has to be carefully planned, or men will die." He said it calmly, as if everyone knew this.

"Are you afraid?"

"When I think about it, yes. It's one reason I've wanted to see you for so long. I should have left a month ago, but then this delay came, something stupid and political. As if the men we are to go and find can wait while we argue about how many gold louis for this, how many for that, and what business is going to get what contract for blankets, for tinned food. It makes me sick to think of those men, lost, counting on help to arrive, but none comes, while the men who make these decisions go home at night to warm fireplaces and beds." He got up and started to pace, stretching his long legs, and the settled dust flew again. "I don't know what we'll find up there. We could be lost too, for all I know. So in some ways, yes, I saw these past few months as perhaps not only my last in Paris, but perhaps my last on this earth. I wanted to spend them with you, but it didn't work. It never worked."

"I'm sorry," I whispered. "You can't know..."

"I think about dying now, and I never used to. Forgive me, that sounds so craven. But to think that we have at best only a few weeks, and that I might die ..."

"I might, too."

"What?" he said, incredulous. "Don't madden me, Christine. If I thought even one of your fingernails would be harmed..."

Again to my mind sprang that memory embedded in the flesh, the man inside the woman, and the usual consequence that followed. Motherless children, gravesites with stones where two or three "beloved wives" were laid to rest. Mama Valerius had had no children, and had told me nothing, but it was a knowledge that every woman shared, that sometimes women died.

When Raoul would leave, there would be a ceremony at the dock. Ribbons would fly, banners would wave, a naval band would play. Women would throw flowers and some bold ones would kiss the sailors as they strode on board. Everyone knew men could die, that ships were lost or went down, that men could drift in rafts for weeks and then be found frozen, the small boat stuffed with rigid corpses that still clung together for warmth long since vanished. But no band played for the wives whose bodies served as a stage for the age-old drama. Then, as the fear began to climb, I pushed it down as I had before. It won't happen, I told myself. Look at Mama, she went for almost thirty years of marriage without ever conceiving once. It doesn't happen to everyone. As I told myself this comforting fiction, I felt the tension in my spine ease a little.

"It's nothing," I told Raoul after a silence. "Simply a case of 'the vapors.' I'm overtired, that's all."

Sympathy blossomed in his eyes, but he kept his face still. "If you are fatigued, I can leave." Then he crumbled a little. "But this grim talk wearies you, perhaps. I will tell you honestly, I am at a loss – to go, to stay, to love you, not to love you."

He spoke of love. It wrenched my heart. "Don't love me," I whispered. "You don't want to love me, believe me."

"What can I do, then? I sit here like a block of wood, and I don't know what to do."

Casting about wildly, I blurted, "Be my friend?"

"Your friend," he answered, his voice echoing hollow and dry off the walls.

An idea occurred to me. "Raoul," I began, not sure what he would say, "You know how, when two people are engaged, they ... they talk? They get to know each other, before they're married?" Encouraged by his calm silence, I went on. "The girl doesn't have to play the coquette. The man doesn't have to worry about whether he will be accepted or not by the girl. They just ... talk. Are more free with each other than when they're courting." I stopped, feeling like an idiot. "We could do that. We could be like that, in this short time before you have to leave."

"I don't understand." He got up and began to pace. "From what you've said, we'll never be engaged."

"I know. That's not what I mean. Not to be really engaged, but to act like we're engaged. In the sense of being able to confide in one another, to tell each other stories and things. To have it like it used to be, when you'd run down to the docks with me to buy the day's fish."

His eyes warmed. "You used to argue with the fisherman's wives. 'This one's slimy, this one's eyes are cloudy.' They snapped right back at you, what does a little chit of thirteen like you know about fish? 'Enough not to buy these,' you'd toss right back. Those days were beautiful, that summer in Perros-Guirec."

"I never bought a bad fish, did I?"

"No, you didn't. Madame Valerius used to praise you to the skies. The fishermen liked you, and I think by the end of the summer they told their wives to give you only the soundest ones."

"So you understand ... I knew you would. Can't it be like that again? Can't we lay aside all these responsibilities, all these complications ..."

"We can't ever lay aside responsibilities," he interrupted. "But we can agree that between us, it is as if we are engaged. Purely for the sake of our friendship. Because there is so little time."

"So little," I echoed.

"It's an interesting idea, to share our thoughts, without the cares of marriage or the need to plan a wedding."

"I hadn't thought of that."

"So I may address you as 'tu.'"

"Yes, you may," I answered at once, using the familiar address with him for the first time since we were young. "In my dressing room."

He withdrew a little. "Of course. Not in public. That wouldn't be seemly, would it?" and he cast a hard look at my left hand.

I sighed. "If we are to share this intimacy between us, you have to pretend that ring isn't there, and not refer to it. I won't be able to bear it if you do."

"How can I forget it? Do you think I'm one of those marble statues in the Louvre, who can stand there implacable and unfeeling?"

"You have to try! Or I can't treat you as a fiancé."

Heavily he strode back over to where I sat, as if I'd piled bricks atop his shoulders. "What you ask is almost impossible, but I'll try. Look, I'll show you my sincerity," and then, as if he still wore his Pierrot outfit from the Masked Ball, he clownishly bowed. "Mademoiselle, I am your swain, for you to command."

I stood up to curtsy, but didn't take his hand. "Monsieur, I accept your offer." Then we both laughed a little, suddenly self-conscious. "This is foolishness, isn't it?"

"Perhaps," he answered, his voice soft. "It doesn't matter. I'll do anything you wish. Just let me come back tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that besides, until the span of our days runs out. I won't ask you any more questions about that which you prefer to keep inside your heart. Just let me sit with you."

I wished I had never rested my hands on his chest, because under my palms I could still feel the warmth even across the emptiness that separated us. "Every day," I said. "Every day that we can. I will write you in the morning, and you'll come in the afternoon."

"Nothing will stand in the way. But I have to ask you one last time, because I will not go behind the back of another man. Do these meetings occur with ... his ... consent, or not? Tell me the truth, because it is essential."

With Raoul every crooked path had to be made straight, every corner dusted, every term clearly laid out. "Rest your conscience. They do. I would not meet with you otherwise."

Something fought its way out of him. "I know I said I would not burden you with questions of this type. But this I must know, because it torments me. If we are to speak together 'as if' we are engaged," and he stressed the conditional not with sarcasm but sorrow, "then you must tell me why. Why does he permit this? For I would not, I can tell you that right now."

"I can't tell you."

"Can't? Or won't?"

"Won't," I whispered. "It would inflame you."

"I will try to keep myself composed," he said, crossing his arms across his chest.

"Because he wants you to be unhappy," I muttered, abashed.

He gaped for a second, then laughed. "That is a most peculiar punishment. In a month, assuming every delay possible, I will have met with you for sixty hours, sixty hours of happiness I would not have envisioned two nights ago, when you showed me your back and I thought I would never find you again. Every hour is a gift. Make me unhappy, indeed."

He had to strain a little forward to hear my response. "We shall see, Raoul. We shall see."

o o o o o o o o o o o o o

The days followed one after another, as if in a dream. Margot followed Erik's instructions strictly to the letter. Milk delivery started at our apartment. Every morning she mixed half a cup of the rich top milk into my coffee. Margot could cook, too, as well as marketing. While I sipped my _café au crème_, she made a breakfast worthy of a farm laborer, and when I balked at finishing it, she squinted her eyes and said, "Strict instructions, Madame. Do you remember?"

Adèle complained about the dishes, so many more now that Margot had taken over in the kitchen, but Margot simply laughed her short barks, and the young housemaid withdrew, affronted. I made peace with her, telling her that while the kitchen had become Margot's domain, she had many duties throughout the rest of the apartment, and reassured her that she was in no danger of losing her position. If Margot was to cook, she would do the dishes as well. That mollified both of them a little, and then there was peace. Freed of kitchen work, Adèle made the rest of the apartment sparkle, and I even set Adèle to polishing Mama and the Professor's old silver, not strictly a kitchen task as it was stored in the walnut buffet in the dining room.

The spats between the women resolved, I could attend to Erik's orders, which were simple. I was to rest, and especially to sleep in as long as I liked, and I did, deeply, luxuriously. Never again, as I recall, have I ever slept as I did in those days. It may have been that Margot had dosed me with one or more of those powders that Erik had mentioned, or it simply may have been that sleep produces more sleep. After breakfast I would work a little on my acorned oak-leaf lace, or sit with Mama while she knitted a scarf or crocheted.

Margot or Adèle were to wake me only to go to rehearsal. One foggy, rainy mid-morning I stretched out in Mama's big bed right alongside her, and the two of us shared an impromptu nap. No one interrupted me for lunch, because I had at first protested that I would eat none, as it would interfere with singing during rehearsal. Margot nodded amiably, "That's just what he said, too." So on those days Adèle would shake me gently, saying, "It's time, so sorry to disturb you, but it's time to get ready to go to the Opera," and I would roll off Mama's bed or the couch, stretching and blinking.

It felt strange to ride in a cab the short distance to the Opera, to alight as if I were a grand lady getting out of her carriage. Doormen who had never noticed me before when I crept in the side entrance, now greeted me when I pulled up to the front. The charwomen nodded their heads when I passed. I hung outside the rehearsal hall door on the first day back, afraid to go in for fear that someone would see, someone would know. I anticipated their raised eyebrows, their sarcastic and knowing questions, "Where have you been, Mademoiselle Daaé? What have you been up to?" Again the fancy returned that there was some kind of mark on my forehead to point me out to the scorn of the world. In Carlotta's absence, however, her claque seemed to have lost its force. After a few rehearsals, one or two of her hangers-on even nodded politely to me, remarking that my rest must have done me good, as I looked remarkably healthy and pink of cheek.

No one remarked upon or even looked at my ring.

After rehearsal, I practically flew from the hall or auditorium, ignoring the singers and dancers who milled about, chatting. Raoul will be waiting, I thought, and he did not disappoint me. Tea was forbidden to me now as it interfered with sleep and caused vocal cord spasms, so Erik said, and instead I had sent to my _loge _some port or _sauternes_ to enjoy with the fruit or little cakes Raoul and I shared in the early evening.

My refusal to eat lunch daunted Margot not one whit. She made up for it by cooking a substantial supper and sat over me until I ate it, as if I were a child. Then, before bed, she brought me a tall glass of the last of the day's milk, warmed and spiced with a splash of brandy. Full as a tick, drifting into drowsiness from the drink, I boarded the little boat that bore me away to another night rocking in the arms of Morpheus. Darkness fell around me before the clock even struck the hour of ten, lifting only when I rolled out tender and sleep-swollen twelve or so hours later.

Through those drowsy weeks I moved like one of the slow lorises at the Paris Zoo. Raoul revelled in my calm. My racing thoughts slackened, my pounding heart relaxed, and my hands no longer jerked when I took off my hat or smoothed out the tablecloth on the little pedestal table. I presided like a queen over that little table, and laughed rich and low at our lazy conversations.

Sometimes I caught him staring at me, and an indolent flame grew up from my center, flowing outward. "What is it?" I breathed one day.

"You're looking remarkably well," he murmured, a little embarrassed at having been caught allowing his eyes to rove. "Not to offend, Christine, but the night of the Masque I feared for you, so pale and wan. Now you're pink as a berry, and your face is like a ripening apple. You seem fresh and rested."

"I am," I remarked. "All I do when I am not rehearsing, it seems, is sleep. And meet with you."

"It seems to have done your constitution a world of good," and beneath the kind words there was an undercurrent of languorous sensual appreciation. I could feel the war in him, as the desire to take me in his arms fought with his need to keep our agreement, that we would be as those engaged, but only to a certain degree. "So no late nights, then," and his voice quavered a little as he said it.

"None," I reassured him. "It's what I imagine it would be like to be a little girl again, but I was never so indulged a girl. From when I was old enough to walk, there were tasks I was given to do. Card the wool, sweep the floor, gather eggs. Papa even showed me how to milk the cow, although I never could get very much out of her. By the time I was big enough, Mama, my real one, I mean, Mama was too weak. Were my parents here, they would think me shamefully indulgent now."

"You need to care for yourself," he remarked. "Just as a farmer has to keep his tools sharp and look after his crops in the field, you have to mind your health. Because without it, you can't sing. It's not indulgence, no more than is sharpening an axe or a hoe. Your voice is your instrument, and an instrument must be maintained."

Astonished, I nodded my head. "You understand that. Not many people do..." I was about to say, except for Erik, but fortunately stoppered my mouth in time. If he noticed that I'd almost made a gaffe, he gave no sign.

"How has your voice been?"

"If you would come to a rehearsal, you'd know," I said, lowering my lashes at him. He looked surprised, as if not expecting that from me.

"You know I'm at the naval yard most of the day," he said. "If I could come I would, but I cannot break free. I would like to, so much," and under his tone came that longing once again.

"You'll have to hear Friday's performance of _La Juive_ and decide for yourself how my voice sounds," I smiled. "In rehearsal, it's been golden. I had no idea how it had deteriorated until I heard myself over the past few days. I don't mean to brag, but today, there was a crowd around me when I'd finished. No one applauded, they wouldn't do that, but they were listening raptly. M. Gabriel said he had never heard me in such fine form, that whatever rest cure I had submitted myself to, he wanted to know the secret."

He slid from his chair over to where I sat on the settee, which we had pulled up to the table. It made me breathless, for he had not been so close to me since the day I'd first come back, the day our hands played over each other. I smelled the bright winter air on him and something underneath, too, something warm and impatient that he had fought so long, and was now winning the struggle inside his heart, inside his body. Leaning over me, he took my hand in his, the ringless one. His palms were almost wet.

I tried to pull my hand away, but he held it firmly, resting my hand on his thigh, where a large muscle started to twitch. Then he did let my hand go, only to run his fingers down gently over my cheek. "Christine," he breathed, "You are so beautiful. I have never seen you like this, like a bud ready to blossom. If you were a bouquet, I would bury my face in you and drown in your perfume. Every day I come to visit you. Every day we drink wine, and laugh, and when I leave, my heart soars over Paris like one of Montgolfier's balloons, but when I reach my home, I am almost in tears. Every day I return, only to find you more beautiful, more composed, more placid and tender than the day before, sitting here as if this _loge_ were your own throne room. No, don't pull away like that. I'm sorry, I cannot keep still any longer."

His voice shook with emotion, and licking his lips, he went on and I knew something was coming, something important. "I spoke to my superior officer today." He hesitated, hoping I would guess what he was to say, figure it out for myself so that he wouldn't have to hear his words fall like little stones out of the sky, to crush the gentle little world we had made for ourselves. "I asked him about my commission. He said it was possible for me to arrange for a six-month's leave."

These lotus-laden days had slowed my brain, and I struggled to think of what he meant. "That means you won't embark with your expedition."

"That's exactly what it means." He slid his arm around me and I looked down but didn't pull away this time. He drew me into his arms' circle just short of an embrace, and the heat rising off his skin made me think of another's skin and another's heat. He put his face down next to mine, the cinnamon-scented breath wafting my cheek. Oh, don't, I thought, please don't come so close, because I want you to so badly, and this cannot be. "Christine," he breathed low, and a long shiver of delight went through me at the warm feel of his breath, so mingled with mine now, "I can't leave. Not at present. Please understand ... I'm so glad that you sleep, but I think you must have stolen all of mine, because I have so little left. Then, when I do sleep, I see you before me," and then he stopped, face flushed red, and looked away. "I am not going. I can't."

"But," I stammered, "but, you promised."

"Promised whom? The President of the Third Republic? The Navy? I already told you, I can be released from my commission."

"Me," I whispered. "You promised me."

"Promised you?" he cried, and the full heat of his passion poured over me. "Oh, cruel woman, to be so beautiful, and to have so little heart. Why would I promise you that I would leave? From when you first returned, this voyage was a burden to me. It did not occur to me that these arrangements were possible."

Don't take me in your arms, I prayed. Don't do it, please, because if you do, I will never crawl out of them, and someone must have heard that prayer, because he pulled himself away, and I felt the warmth of his body go with him. "But what will that mean for you?"

"What will it mean? It was one of two obstacles that stand between us. I have removed one. Now it is up to you to remove the other."

"I don't understand," I lied.

"What kind of bond lies upon you, that you cannot set it aside? I have freed myself, Christine. I want you to free yourself, to free your heart for me."

"Don't ask me that. Please."

He struggled to stand up, then changed his mind and sat down, and if the heat of his skin could have reached around and embraced me, it would have. Something massive and dark moved through him, and before my new knowledge, my new flesh had come upon me, I would not have recognized it. Now I did, and a hot fierce truth pierced me. Raoul wanted me, as a man wanted a woman. He struggled against that wildness, beating it down as it rose up rebellious once more. He must have won over his heart, for finally he stood and turned away from me rapidly, fumbling for his hat and his jacket like a man blinded. Out the door he stumbled, leaving me alone in that small room with dusty furniture and an oversize mirror which glared at me like a giant's single unblinking eye.

I ignored Erik's demands that I take cabs, and with head and throat thoroughly muffled, walked back to the long narrow apartment on the Rue-de-Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. A little breathless, I panted at the top of the stairs just as Margot came up herself, carrying the evening mail. Silently she handed me a letter, written in a large sprawling hand.

"You were out in the cold, weren't you?" she remarked.

"How did you know?"

"You're panting like a bellows, and your hat's about knocked off. Trying to get me in trouble?"

"No, not at all," I mused. "Do you mind? I'd like to read my mail."

Grinning, she went into the kitchen and began slicing onions.

I read the short note, one sentence, and felt the blood leave my face. "No supper for me tonight," I murmured.

"Madame," she said, stamping her foot a little, "I won't have this ..."

"Oh, be quiet, Margot," I retorted. "I'm leaving this evening."

She peered out with interest. "I thought so, soon as I saw the handwriting. Distinctive, isn't it? Let me see that," and before I could protest, she had snatched it out of my hand. "I don't see a time written on it. Just like a man, to expect you to jump whenever they call. Well, I know he won't give you supper, and it's my job to build up your blood." Then she looked at me slyly. "In that much hurry to go, are you?"

Flustered, I put the letter in the rack with the others on my desk. Something had occurred to me. "Let me help you in the kitchen," I said, afraid she'd refuse me outright, as she'd chased Adèle out. "I'll bone and fillet the chicken."

"Sure you know how to do that without cutting your fingers to shreds?" she asked, dubious, but she stepped aside and let me into her sacred preserve.

The meat slid apart under the razor-sharp back-and-forth slices. We're like that underneath too, I thought. It's all flesh, under the skin. I cleared my throat, not knowing how to start. "Margot? I want to ask you something," and she managed a small grunt as she pressed garlic. "Have you ever been married?"

She laughed. "Never bothered with it."

"Oh," I said in a small voice. "I won't trouble you, then."

Hand on hip, she set aside her onion and smirked. "I know what you're asking, missy, as mealy-mouthed as you are."

How did Erik stand her insolence, or did she save up all her cheek just for me? "I don't think so."

"You think that since old Margot hasn't had a piece of paper from the bureaucrats in her dresser drawer, since no one sprinkled incense over her, that she doesn't know anything about the marriage bed. Such a little _na__ïf_ you are."

I flushed hard, not knowing how to start.

"The missus hasn't told you a damn thing, has she? And I bet you went to one of those convent schools."

It felt good to catch her out at something. "You're wrong. I never went to a convent school. My father and Professor Valerius taught me themselves."

"Oh, that's such an improvement. At least in the girls' schools they talk about something at night when the lights are out, even if most of it's wrong."

"You don't have to tell me anything," I said, suddenly angry. "I won't bother you."

"Now hold on," she said, suppressed laughter shaking her round shoulders. "I never said nothing like that. I had her full attention as she wiped her hands on her apron, looking shrewdly at me with black-button eyes. "What is it you want to ask?"

This was so difficult. "When a man is ... when he is, uh, with a woman, you know... the first time a woman is with a man ... "

"Oh, don't waste time," she shot back. "What do you need to know? Just spit it out."

Little pink mounds of chicken sat in a row in front of me. If I tapped them, they'd quiver. Like flesh. They were flesh. Like me. Like Erik. "Is it supposed to hurt?" I choked out as fast as I could.

"Oh, you clumsy fool," she said under her breath, but not to me. "It can. Even if he takes his time and doesn't go too fast. How bad?" and her tone wasn't rough any more, but sympathetic.

"Like fire," I said, hot with shame. "But it was over quickly. Then it burned a little the next day. I'm sorry, it seems so unfitting to talk about this."

"You walk through the streets after a rain, you're going to get muck on your skirts, missy. What makes you think you're above other folks, above life? I haven't just nursed sick old ones. Did some work for the midwives, too, after the mothers had their babies. You poor young girls, don't know a single thing, and too proud or too shamed to ask. Wish we'd had this little chat earlier. I just assumed, you a singer and all, that someone had widened that crack a long time ago. That's what I say, once the door to the barn's been opened, the goats go in and out at will. Listen, young miss. What you said doesn't sound too bad to me. Was there blood?"

"A little," I admitted.

"But not enough to scare you."

"Not at all. I was surprised, I thought there would be more. Like the monthlies."

She laughed, her hips shaking. "Now that would be a sight."

I thought of Erik's letter, and going to him tonight. "Does it ... does it ever get better? Because I don't know how women have more than one child."

Again she laughed, harder this time. "You look like such a prissy little thing, but I can look at you and tell something, my young woman. You have the heat in your veins, the fire in your blood. I had it too, as a young one. You roll your eyes up, as if between you and the likes of me there was no comparison. Well, I'll tell you something. Between the Comtesse and the chambermaid who empties the pot there's precious little difference under the petticoats, except one pops those babies out a lot easier than the other, and it's not the Comtesse, who's too refined to squat down over a pan like the chambermaid does.

"I've had three men in my life that lasted, and the others aren't worth mentioning. The first time, with the first one it was in the barn, in the hay byre, and no one but he and the cows heard me cry out. A month later I was screaming again, but not the same sort, if you take my meaning. He was big and he was rough but he could turn hell into heaven, once I got used to him, that is."

"Why?" I whispered. "Why does it have to hurt like that?"

"Don't know," she mused. "Maybe it's all part of the curse of Eve. Maybe if it didn't hurt so much at first, we'd open our legs to just any Pierre that came along, and the world'd be knee-deep in bastards. But it isn't always like that," and she looked at me with such pity that the tears rose and stung my eyes. "It gets better, until it gets so good you can't imagine living without it." She drifted away in thought for a moment, recollecting, before turning back to her onions once more. "Then you learn to live without it all over again."

My head swam. I couldn't match her words with my memory of that long sharp sword-thrust in the dark. Still confused, my mind a turmoil, I sat in the kitchen and watched her prepare supper. She seemed kinder than usual, softer, and after Adèle set out the plates, I praised her cooking, and she smiled.

(_continued_...)


	18. Sabine Woman

**Sabine Woman**

**A/N: ** _A tip of the hat to Jennie for showing me Ivar Arosenius's painting, "Romance."_

I don't remember Paris in August being so cool, yet today it was. The stiff breezes from the sea never slackened. I pinned my black-netted hat on securely and went to meet M. Peillard at the little café on the corner. Its wood façade was old and worn, its blue paint peeled in the eastern sun, but the awnings of bright blue and gold glowed shiny and fresh. Chattering women held their rose-bedecked hats with one hand and demitasse cups with the other. He sat reading a newspaper, a red-brown fox among a sea of pink or white doves. His glasses glinted in the morning sun.

When he rose to greet me he took both my hands into his plushy warm ones. The wind flung his newspaper away, and it caught on the wire legs of the next table. He apologized with ruddy blushes, and I reassured him, "It's quite all right, M. Peillard, no one can hold onto anything in this wind. But it keeps the city tolerably cool." Having secured the paper, he looked at me expectantly, wanting me to start. But start what? "I'm surprised to find you in Paris during this season. No one else is," I remarked after a long moment.

"Look around, Madame," he said with twinkling eyes. "What do you see on the street?"

"The crowds that throng Paris day and night."

"Do they seem less to you, or more than at other times?"

"Less, I suppose."

"But crowds, nonetheless."

I laughed. "Indeed, Monsieur. Were everyone to desert Paris in August, we would be alone in this café," and then flushed cold and hot at the same time at my indiscreet remark. "That doesn't answer my question, however."

"It wasn't a question," he answered, trying not to grin but failing. "It was an indirect remark, and thus seemed to require the same in return."

"Oh, nonsense," I said, suddenly not caring about my embarrassment or hurting his feelings. "By all rights I should have been with my children and their families in De Haan, and yet here I sit, wondering about my sanity."

"And mine too? After all, I'm here as well."

"Yes, yours too, if you must."

"I hate sea bathing, and the mountain air doesn't agree with me. I suppose I could visit Copenhagen or Stockholm for the cool air, but having no one to accompany me, I might as well remain here. Even in summer, the well-appointed old need someone to look after their affairs."

"To be honest," I answered, "I don't much like the seaside either, not at least since the coasts have been taken over by resorts and the sea itself filled with bathing machines. It's odd you mention Stockholm. I have not been back to my native land since girlhood."

"You're Swedish?" he asked, all feinting courtesy gone now.

"Indeed," I said. "My French has never lost its accent."

"I wouldn't call it an accent, Madame, but rather a lilt, as if you sang your words rather than spoke them. It's most pleasant to the ear."

The curse of pale skin is that every emotion plays on the surface. I used to think Erik could almost read my thoughts, but it was not my thoughts he read, simply my face. "I did used to sing, long ago."

"I can believe it, a_ chanteuse_. But no doubt your duties at home kept you from it."

"Certainly," I remarked, wanting to stay vague.

He ordered coffee and brioche for us. "Turkish style?" he asked, and I nodded. Erik had made the thick _kahvesi_ for us every morning. "How sweet would you like it?"

"_Orta şekerli_," I answered, and he looked surprised.

"You've had this before, I see. Sweetened, then, for the lady. And _sade_ for me."

"Brave you are, to drink it black. I never got the hang of that. Have you stayed among the Ottomans, then?"

"On an assignment last year. A wealthy Frenchman spent his last years in Constantinople and died there, leaving everything a-tangle. I took advantage of every spare moment," he answered, and his large brown eyes grew dreamy. "Don't tell M. Gagnepain, but I have the ambition to travel in the East and write about it. I had an article published in the magazine _Le Ronde_ when I returned, but under another name. M. Gagnepain didn't want clients to think we drones in his hive had anything else on their minds besides the law."

"Drones, then?" The coffee came, dark and very sweet. "But certainly there is more for you in life than work."

"You were an artist, Madame, and lucky to draw your daily bread from your creations."

Was I? "Singing at the Opera is not that creative," I remarked. "Mostly, it's brute memorization of complex music in a language you don't understand. Then there are all the movements, the blocking, the gestures that have to be precisely replicated. Sometimes I used to feel like a puppet on strings."

"That quality in your voice," he mused. "It must have been glorious. I can hear it across the years." Then his eyes changed rapidly from soft to sharp, as they had in his office. "It must have been what, thirty-some years ago?"

"Yes," I said, not sure I wanted to follow down this path.

"But of course you weren't Madame de Chagny then."

"No, of course not," and I said nothing else in that vein as I buttered a slice of brioche. "See, they didn't disappoint us. These currants are almost the size of my thumb. Where were you thirty-some years ago, M. Peillard?"

"A few years out of short pants," he laughed, "A gymnasium student preparing for the university."

"How old are you, then? It would be entirely rude for you to ask me that, although in your sly way you already have, but I'm thoroughly within limits asking you. I want to make sure my attorney has enough years to make him sober and responsible."

His eyes got a little wide at first, then he laughed. "Forty-eight. Although that bit of etiquette always seemed to put the rougher sex at the disadvantage."

"Balanced by so many of your other privileges, so no disadvantage whatever. You're well-preserved, Monsieur."

"You are beyond well-preserved, Madame, you are radiant. I sincerely did not take you for the mother of a man Dr. de Chagny's age," and he gave a little bow of the head. "More brioche?" The steady breeze cooled our coffee and he called for the waiter to replace it.

"So what was your magazine story about?"

"The French and German engineers who worked for the Ottomans in the mid- to late 19th century. I toured fortresses, shipyards, spoke with military men. There were some remarkable inventions, more than few of which the Ottomans wished to keep strictly secret, for fear of inflaming the Americans and British. Governments were involved in the secrecy, as they always are."

I started to tremble a little, although it was far from cold. "So these are your 'other pursuits' you mentioned two days ago."

He nodded seriously. "Someday I will be free to investigate and write what I choose. So much goes on beneath our very noses, and the powers that be would like us not to notice. Take, for instance, that mysterious skeleton found in the Garnier Opera."

"Not so mysterious, I would think," I remarked, wary.

"I would imagine your son would know," he offered.

"How did you hear about it in the first place?"

He leaned forward, looking like a great boy. "Surely you know, having been a performer yourself, how theater people talk. In addition, I helped the investigating magistrate find the men who dug it up." A puppy bringing his favorite ball to his mistress's feet could not have looked happier.

I set my coffee cup down, for fear of dropping it. "You! Philippe mentioned you. You're telling everyone you were there when it was uncovered! He said it wasn't true," and now I was really angry.

"No, no," he protested. "That's not the case, not the case at all. The newspapers reported that, but they got it all wrong. I wasn't there when they uncovered it. I went to the site a few days later to see for myself, and that's when the Opera police threw me unceremoniously out."

"Why should I believe you over my son?" I pulled my purse close to me, ready to leave in an instant.

"Because no man is omniscient, and reporters do get their facts wrong. I swear to it. Come with me to the Opera Garnier and we will talk to them. Madame de Chagny, I cannot bear you thinking that I would lie to you. I have no need to lie to any man, or woman for that matter, especially a beautiful one. Don't toss your head like that, it only convinces me the more."

"So you admit you are the one snooping around, interfering with the doctors' investigations."

"I wouldn't put it quite that way."

"Monsieur Peillard, how exactly would you put it?" He was outrageous, like Louvel when he was an adolescent, all impetuous passion.

He leaned toward me as if the rose-hatted women at the neighboring tables might hang onto our every word. "There is something in the Garnier that they are trying to conceal. I spend my days searching through the business of people who have something to hide - men who are spending their wives' dowries on mistresses; fathers trying to cheat sons of their inheritance; businessmen siphoning money from their partners. I earn my daily bread uncovering deception, not spinning it. One would expect to find a body or two in the Garnier. You can't imagine how the cellars go down many stories beneath the street. It's a labyrinth down there, and every labyrinth has a minotaur or two at its center. That they've only found one body amazes me, for I would suspect far more. But in any event, the management and investigating magistrates all clammed up over what should have been a simple exhumation. Their response was inordinate, given the circumstances. A man who overreacts has secrets, Madame, and bureaucrats even more so."

"What exactly do you suspect?" I said, fearing to go with him but drawn on all the same.

"A conspiracy," he breathed. "There is something down there, or was, that they want no one to see. And I am going to find it. I was hoping your son would help me."

"I don't think Dr. de Chagny is interested in conspiracies. He was more concerned about the individual they found, who she was, how she died, and how she would be treated when the investigation was over."

"She? So it was a she," and he stroked his side-whiskers as he thought. "How _did _she die?"

I kicked myself under the table, literally. He thought he would trick me, did he? "I'm not at liberty to say. I've been indiscreet as it is."

"No, of course not." His warm smile held not a trace of chicanery. Nonetheless, a cold suspicious embarrassment covered me. I had stared at his back, at his thighs like a moon-struck girl just off the farm. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I said to myself. He probably has a mistress half your age. This doesn't concern you, or your voice, or whatever's left of your beauty. He's weaseling his way into your confidence to feed his obsession.

"No doubt there will be a report, and you will be the first to read it," I said drily. "Imagine, Philippe wanted to come along to our meeting at your office. That would have been an interesting sight had you interrogated him there." At least if he had come with me, a younger man wouldn't now be playing me for a fool.

"You're angry with me."

The time for coquetry was past. "Yes, I am. You used me to get to my son."

"No," he said, and his face grew really ruddy. "I wanted to meet with you before I found out that you were Dr. de Chagny's mother."

"It didn't seem like that in the course of our conversation."

"I'm clumsy with women, so you were right to wonder why I am not married. Yes, I know that's what you thought, as I saw it in your eyes the other day."

"I appreciate your honesty. Yes, that's true. I did wonder." The sour tense anger and strong coffee had clenched my stomach, but now it relaxed a little.

"It's my nature to investigate. I should have been a journalist or writer or traveler. But my father insisted I read the law, and he was a man of powerful persuasive energy. That and the tears of my mother set me on my course. It took me a long time to find my true nature, and late in my life the desire is stronger than ever. I am cursed to ask questions, and if I cannot find the answers, I am inclined invent them."

"You said that you did not lie. What else is that, if you invent solutions you cannot find?"

"When we invent a fictional story, we spin carefully controlled lies."

"But that skeleton is not fictional, nor is the story of how it got there. You hardly look to be at the end of your life." But then, Raoul did not look that way either, when he was struck with that fateful bolt from the blue. "And what has this in any way to do with being married or unmarried?"

"Women don't like questions," he said, rubbing the soft fold under his chin.

"Some think women do nothing but ask questions."

"No one has accused me of being a woman yet, but questions are my life. I am polite to clients out of long habit. But my great passion in life is to know, and to tell others about it. Women don't want to be known. They hide behind custom, behind artifice, behind false lashes and promises."

"Someone has hurt you," I said softly.

He looked away. "Yes. Forgive me, you can't want to hear any of this."

"That's not so. Perhaps sometime I do. You must understand though, we don't often want to be known. What's underneath is painful or unseemly, and we have no defense against the consequences."

The two of us suddenly jelled into an island of intimacy at our small metal table, screened off from the other café-goers by the warming sunlight. "You're going to leave, aren't you? To catch your train?" he asked after a moment.

"Yes. You sound disappointed."

"You're leaving because I'm asking too many questions."

"Perhaps a little. There's also the small fact that trains depart at fixed times rather than at our convenience." Then an irresistible mad thought occurred to me. "I will however leave you with one thing," and he looked up alert as a fox who's scented the hare. "Think of it as a souvenir of our meeting. You asked about my singing career. The name I sung under was Daaé."

" Daaé," he whispered, looking as though I had struck or kissed him, I couldn't tell which. "It is you. Christine Daaé."

"Good luck making any use of it, Monsieur," and I left.

Before I entered my hotel, I had an overwhelming impulse to look back. He was still sitting at the metal table, staring at me through the interplaying weave of the street's throngs.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

The summons from Erik came. Margot insisted on sending Adèle for a cab, and so I waited in the vestibule, a few things packed in a small satchel, watching the children up the street play one last game of stickball before their mothers called them in to supper. Mine rested heavily inside me and I longed to walk to my meeting, but the cab was coming, and so I looked up and down the street until the creaky black brougham appeared.

The driver helped me in as I clumsily tried to keep the carriage mud off my skirts. It was early in the evening but tiredness already plucked at my sleeve, and I had to shake myself awake when we reached the Rue Scribe. "You sure you want this side, Mam'selle?" the driver asked. "No one goes in here."

"It's all right," I answered, handing him his fee and a generous tip besides. He doffed his hat and went around to the front, where there was more chance of catching a fare. When he was gone, I ducked into the arched entrance and began my long slow descent into the cool, dark tunnels beneath the Opera Garnier.

I had my key ready, that heavy iron thing with the grinning satyr on its head. However, the Rue Scribe gate was open. I pulled it shut behind me, intending to lock it, but something wouldn't line up and no amount of pushing would make it budge. So I left it closed as best I could and surrendered myself to the dim blue shadows. The corridor swallowed me like a throat. Tiny jewel-like flames spurted up from the gas pipes that ran down the stone. It felt good to move after so many inert days, and the walk was easy.

As I got closer to the hallway that opened onto the lakeshore, side corridors began to appear. I looked down one. Cold air wafted out at me as I peered into a gloomy pass, where water plopped slowly out of a leaky pipe to make a shiny pool. Blackness lay upon it like a skin. I pulled away quickly from the next one I peered into, because there were no lights at all, only a hole of velvet black. Waves of cool, musty air blew out of it. "Erik?" I called into the darkness and my voice came back mockingly. At the sight of that long inky hole I hurried on, imagining something coming out of it that would slither up my skirt before I knew it was there.

I stopped, my heart pounding. There had been a noise that I didn't imagine. Then my fancies raced like horses free of rein or bridle. What if there was an accident and the gasmen shut off the lines down below? I would flounder in a passageway as dark as the one I had just fled. Blind, I would stumble round and round in circles until the pressing dark fell on me and squeezed out my last breath. Cursing myself for not bringing even a box of matches, I hurried now, with no more leisurely progress through the corridor. Around the lake there was that narrow stairway to navigate. The threat of darkness descending over the whole underground spurred me on.

Cloth scraped stone, this time to the side. I walked even faster now, frightened but growing angry besides. Erik told me that if I wore his ring I would be safe, yet something other than my own fears pursued me. Something stalked me in the dark, and why should that creature of the underground respect Erik or his ring?

Perhaps it's Erik himself, I thought. The skin on my neck shivered, as if I were observed in the dark. "Erik?" I called out. "Is that you?" Only echoes answered.

A final corridor met with the walkway before the lakeshore. I steeled myself to pass it, shrinking to the wall on the other side, feeling my own skirts slide over the dripping stone. Go quickly, I told myself. The faster you go, the sooner it will be behind you. Then that rustle came again. My heart pounded so quickly that it almost hurt. There was something within that corridor, something black and shadowy. I stopped, immobilized by fear. A tall, slender form emerged to stand square in my path. In my fist I gripped the great iron key, ready to slash it like a knife if I had to, but my hands shook convulsively and I could scarcely lift my arm.

The black shadow spoke. "Mademoiselle Daaé," came a lilting, accented voice. I shrunk back out of reach, and into the perimeter of flickering gaslight stepped a man. His silvered black hair glimmered in the dim corridor light.

"Who are you?" I cried out, and then remembered Erik's ring. _You are safe as long as you wear it_, he had told me, and so I thurst my hand into the dark stranger's face. "Look," I said, feeling like a child waving around a toy wooden sword, not good for anything. "Let me pass."

He chuckled to himself, "So he told the truth after all." He stepped aside, but not far enough for me to get by. His pale olive face with its black-lashed almond eyes looked familiar but I couldn't place him, and didn't want to try. "I had to see it for myself."

"What are you talking about? You have no right to stand in my way."

"Of course not, Mademoiselle. My apologies," and he nodded his head to me as if we were on the boulevard rather than five cellars below the Opera House. He had a short well-groomed beard, iron-grey in the gloom. "You look like you know the way."

"Which way I go is none of your concern."

"Erik's concerns are my concerns," he answered.

The leaden weight in my stomach seemed to double in size. "You know Erik," I breathed, suddenly light-headed. I wanted him to go away, for I feared to meet him on that narrow walkway, or worse yet, have him pursue me when I ascended the stairs that ran alongside the lake. If he engaged me in some kind of struggle, I might plunge into that icy green-glowing water.

"I do know Erik," he said in the same strangely musical tones, making no effort to move.

"Then you know he will not tolerate having me interfered with." Instead of brave, my voice came out weak and short of breath. "Anyway, I'm late. Please step aside, as I don't wish to brush the walls with my skirt."

He shook his head as if puzzled, gave a mocking little bow, then slid back into the niche from which he'd come. His long dark eyes were naggingly familiar but I could not place them. Anxiously I looked behind me several times, but he did not follow.

As I crept around the lake, the slow ponderous chords of the middle of Beethoven's _Appassionata _echoed off the stone. They drew me forward, my steps quickening of their own accord as the notes did themselves. It was as if Erik sensed my coming and allowed himself this brief but urgent musical interlude between heavier and more ponderous deliberations.

His front door was open, and the light from inside bathed the surrounding rock with a soft yellow glow. My steps echoed elephantine across the threshold. Should I announce myself? Tapping on the stone hurt my knuckles, and my faint raps made no sound that could be heard over the final thundering rolls coming from the piano. So I strode directly inside, not calling his name, knowing that he would not want his practice interrupted.

The third movement erupted into a bat-swirl of notes that surged around the entrance and out into the cavern beyond. To the slow beat I crept inside to stand at the entrance to his drawing room, to watch his erect back as he played. His arms crackled as if animated by lightning, but his shoulders remained as relaxed as a man who enjoys the summer sun, drifting lazily in a little boat. His poor scraggy locks blew around with his rapid movements. How can he make the piano sound like an enormous resonating harp? I wondered. From behind he was beautiful to watch as he teased the frantic tickle higher, then lower, then up the scale again. Yet he never hurried, even though the music did.

Again he spun out that thick harplike roll, and something inside me rolled along with it. He had to know I was there, for he started to show off a little, still unhurried though his fingers flew. His back drew up a little higher, and notes cascaded from those energetic arms. The paisley patterns on his dressing gown danced, those fat embryonic forms with little swirls of their own. He hammered, he flew, what little hair he had blossomed around his head until down he went, down, down until he rested in the thick rich chordal conclusion and the ringing silence that followed.

He closed the folio and turned to me like a man in a dream. In his robe he looked smaller, almost frail. His face was thinner than before, brutally ravaged but suffused with the pure light of naked emotion. Never had I seen him in his drawing room without a coat, and the intimacy bore my breath away. It was like seeing him undressed. With hands spread out as if he were stretching them, he drank in my whole appearance from crown to toe. His breath stood suspended, too, because after a moment he let it out in a long sigh. "Beautiful," he breathed. "Erik has cared for you well."

It broke the moment. When I laughed, "You haven't even seen me for several weeks," he flinched a little.

"And a miserable pile of bones you were, as pale and lifeless as your poor Erik," he retorted, his face no longer shining and revealed, but as ordinarily ugly as usual. "Now you look at least as if you might live, and even have the energy to crawl up on stage a few more times." He licked his lips as if he wanted to say something more, wanted to ask something, then thought the better of it. A remnant of passion still shook him, for he trembled when he rose from the bench, and his hands still quivered from the swirling notes as he took the coat from my shoulders. Uninhibited as a child he buried his face in the fur, rubbing his waxy cheeks back and forth in it, breathing in its scent deeply, caressing it with his hands. Then, as if aware of what he had done, he turned away, shamed, and wouldn't look at me as he hung the coat up.

He bade me sit, then went back to the piano and improvised for another hour or so, interspersing his keyboard ramblings with bits of Beethoven. The fire was very warm, and I started to drift. The soft yielding beginning of the "Quasi una fantasia" reminded me of the first days I stayed with him, when there was no difference between night and morning. I thought of moonlight on that glaucous water outside Erik's door, its surface coated with shivering light that had to fall so far through barred grates to reach it.

"You should write these passages down," I commented when he rested his hands on his long thighs. "The ones that are yours, at least."

"Before," he said, "you would have felt compelled to pace the room or hover over me. Now you stretch out as sleek and contented as a cat by the stove."

Before what? I thought, but he didn't expect me to speak. He closed the piano and from him again came that wave of bare emotion. Sitting at my feet, not touching me, he said over and over, "I can't believe you're here, that you came back. It would have killed Erik had you not returned. Don't send your Erik away, your poor Erik," on and on like that. While he muttered, he picked at the carpet as if the fat pears, flowers, and birds would come off into his hands.

I ignored him, closing my eyes until his scratching on the rug stopped. Then I said, "There was a man in the tunnels, on the way down."

"A man?" he said, all alert interest now. "Where?"

"When I came down through the Rue Scribe passageway. He came out of the shadows, out of a cross-tunnel, I think. He sounded foreign, and he was tall, with a little black beard. He said, 'Erik's concerns are my concerns.'"

"He would," Erik growled a bit, under his breath.

"Who is he? And how does he know you?"

"He used to be Erik's friend, but now he spends his time pestering, sneaking about, stalking."

"He did say some odd things." Rather than ask him directly, I just let him ramble.

"Did he approach you? Did he ask you what you were doing here?" In his tone was neither jealousy nor idle curiosity, only cold scrutiny.

"He came out of the shadows and startled me. He knew my name."

"Everyone around the Garnier Opera knows your name, and more will know it in a few days. Pay him no mind. He hangs about spying on people, insinuating his way into their love affairs because he has none of his own," and he gave a dismissive wave.

It wouldn't rest in my mind, though. "Who is he, and where is he from?"

Glaring like the criminal brought before the magistrate and made to grudgingly tell everything, Erik said, "He is from Persia, and you may call him 'Daroga.'"

"What a queer name. He looks so familiar, too."

"I'm sure if you saw him in his customary habitat you'd recognize him." He left his spot at my feet and went over to his desk, where he began to scratch musical notes onto a piece of staff paper with a dark-leaded pencil. As far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.

"Wait," I said as an idea pushed its way through the languid mental heaving which passed for my thoughts these days. "Your Persian friend, the one from long ago. He's here, in Paris?" How odd, that Erik would have something ordinary like a friend. Then one consideration even sharper pierced through the sleepy muck. "No wonder he looked familiar. I've seen him upstairs, watching the ballet dancers practice. Sometimes he chats with that funny man, the one who sits in the auditorium and sketches the ballerinas as they rehearse."

Ignoring me, he continued to write for another moment and then said, "I knew you would recognize him. However, like so many women, you don't know what you want. You tell me to put my musical thoughts down, and then you interrupt me when I do so. Make up your mind."

I nestled in the arms of a soft calm born of the fire and the caress of the most comfortable chair. Sometimes Erik yipped like a puppy whose tail had been trod on. I stretched like a pampered cat and yawned, "Please yourself, then. You always do."

He filled a stack of paper with hastily scrawled musical notes, then tossed the pile aside. "Satisfied?" he said, trying to sound accusatory but not really meaning it.

"I suppose. That reminds me. You are done with your opera? Really done?"

His pique forgotten, he pushed an ottoman over to me, and I put my feet on it. "Twenty years of work," he said in a singsong voice. "But no, it is not yet done, but almost. Close, very close, and then what will become of Erik? Now I have come to a convenient stopping point. I've written an _appassionata_ of my own, slow like the Beethoven, but more tender, and woven it into an aria. I want you to sing it with me."

I used to walk all over Paris. Now the trip on the Rue Scribe path and lazing before his fire had tired me out. "Oh, not tonight," I breathed, drifting again. I had become accustomed to sleeping early in the evening, and sleep I would, though not in my clothes and boots, stiff and uncomfortable. Were I back in the apartment in Paris above, I would simply undress and crawl under the covers. I didn't know what to do here. The rhythm we had created on our earlier days no longer seemed to fit. For one, there was that dressing gown. For another, there was Erik's change of mood. He still snipped at me sarcastically, but it was half-hearted like an old habit. There seemed to be no reason to sit there any longer. "I'm going to retire, Erik," I said as neutrally as I could.

"Do you need a sleeping draught?"

"Hardly, as I can scarcely keep my eyes open."

"Let me prepare one," he said, rubbing his hands together anxiously, a hopeful expression on his face. "It will keep you from waking ... later."

I knew what he meant, and I shook my head, No. Pain I could bear, but not the thought of lying under his body like an inert cushion of flesh. Then my body remembered the heat of his in mine, and it struck me what it meant to "know" someone, to "know" a man. Even if I were unconscious he would plumb me to the depths, search every scrap and particle of me without the necessity for speech or acknowledgment. If that was going to happen I wanted to be part of it, to share in that knowledge too.

He sighed, disappointed, but said nothing. I glided past him into my room with its glossy bright wood. A new lamp sat on the bedside table, with cabbage-fat roses etched into the cloudy glass. At its lowest setting it cast a dim, comforting glow over the warm, rich-textured room.

As I slid into bed, it was as if my flesh felt the luxury that surrounded me for the first time. Nothing had changed; the sheets were still the smoothest Egyptian cotton, the eiderdown coverlet warm and thick, the goose down pillows plumped up softly. The bed welcomed me into its soft embrace, the sheets caressed my limbs, and I responded in turn, nestling down into its charms. No knock came on the door, to be followed by whispered begging. Eventually, cocooned in well-being, I slept.

A rhythmic tapping awakened me. Half in dream I wondered who that could be, and why doesn't Adèle answer it? Then I knew where I was. That tapping could mean only one thing. I crouched under the covers, thinking not to answer. Then his soft and suppliant voice called my name, asking to be let in, could Erik please come in? He would do nothing, he promised. He just wanted to see me.

Hesitantly I agreed, foggy with sleep. He unlocked my door with his key and with equal timidity entered, still in his silk gown and lounging trousers. Looking a little unsure, he stood at the foot of the bed. When he spoke his voice was shy as an adolescent's. "Will you unbraid your hair? I promise Erik will not touch you. He wants only to look."

Confused, I undid it, and draped it all around my shoulders. Since he made no sudden moves I sat up, more awake now and also curious to see what he would do next. Then he began to pull down the covers, and I tugged back, trying to keep them up. "No, no," he said soothingly, "I won't touch you." So I let him pull the covers down entirely, until I sat on the bed with my arms and legs crossed over each other, feeling bare and exposed, embarrassed by the fleshy little belly roll that folded over as I sat. I covered it with my arms.

"Arrange your hair," he whispered.

"How?"

"Like a shawl all over you," he answered, and his breath was very rapid now. "Now, lie down, yes, like that, oh, exactly like that, with your arms at your sides," he said in his most hypnotic, tender voice, and I did.

Little in my life has been stranger than lying beneath Erik's gaze, quivering and naked under a scrap of silk. He went over me like a doctor looking for a tiny malformation on the skin that everyone else has missed. As he swept my flesh with his gaze he murmured under his breath over and over, "So much more beautiful than I had dreamed, it's unimaginable." His soft repetitive chant relaxed me, and I looked at the rough-hewn ceiling as he satisfied the desire of his eyes.

Then he placed his hands on the hem of my chemise, and I tensed. "Please," he begged, again promising, "Erik will not touch you." I trembled so hard that the flesh of my belly and thighs shook without control. There was a watercolor painting on the wall to my left. Ladies of the Sun King's court with high stiff wigs posed unconcerned with my frightened flesh. When he made no move to touch my chemise again, the shaking slowly stopped. "Please," he asked one more time, and I nodded. Unresisting I let him raise my shift to right above my breasts. He held his hands carefully so as to touch only the cloth and not my skin. I fixed my eyes firmly on the watercolor ladies, trying not to hear the rapid intake of his breath as he studied me in the dim flickering light. "Beautiful," he breathed in his lowest and most lyric voice. "A rose-tipped goddess fresh from the sea."

I could not recall ever having been naked in front of anyone since my youngest childhood. Drafts played over my breasts and made them crinkle at the tips, pert and tingly. A little breeze stirred my curls down below, or was it Erik's breath? I did not look, but stared at the watercolor women instead. They had large black beauty moles painted on their tumbling bosoms. "Roll over," he begged, "Oh, please," and so I did, hating the way the flesh on my hips shook, yet drawing a little lick of pleasure from how he gasped when I lay prone and passive on my stomach, naked and defenseless from the back. I was an odalisque on display, hanging on a Salon wall, whose smooth white waist tapered and then swelled into sleek hills round and full. Into the pillow I buried my face, but I couldn't hide from the way it felt to be consumed by eyes, devoured by sight. I felt almost sorry for the intensity of his desire. Then I started to tremble again, for I felt him closer, closer still.

His breath caressed me without touch. Even without seeing them, I knew his hands hovered in the air above me, rounding my contours, setting up miniscule breezes of sensation. Where his hands passed over my skin it warmed of its own will, and when he whispered, "Beautiful," I felt it in the hollow of my spine.

He touched me and I flinched. "No, no," he said in a voice made of warm milk laced with honey, "I am just pulling down your chemise," and if his hands grazed round hips or hills as he traveled downwards, it could just as well have been an accident. He felt close again, terribly close. At any moment he could unbind himself and slide swiftly into my soft center from behind. All he would have to do would be to lift my hips a little, open his clothing, and bury himself in me. A pause. The air turned to jellied desire and we hung suspended in it like the small bits of meat that we were. He gave a long sigh, and with a shift, a vibration, he left the bed.

"Don't turn around," he said, and so I buried my face even more deeply into the pillow. Then the covers slid up over me, first the slippery cotton sheet, then the warm weight of the coverlet, as he lightly tucked me in without touching me, so careful he was. When the lock clicked I knew he was gone. Turning over, I gulped down the long breaths I couldn't take when under the spell of his ghostly palpations.

My room, my bed, my body no longer felt like mine. Fingers shouldn't go between the legs but mine did anyway. I yanked them away quickly, but not before some of the slippery moisture between my thighs coated them. It frightened me a little. He hadn't entered me, so from where did that wetness come? Did women make a kind of seed, too? It was briny and alkaline in smell, slipperier and not so jellylike as his. That unknown, unseen opening hung wet and loose between my fingers. I pulled my hand away again but reluctantly this time.

Such a small opening, such a little space, and everything for men, it seemed, hung upon gaining access to it. Ships were launched, wars fought, kingdoms leveled, that a man might immerse himself in that slick wet flesh. Why, I said to myself. Why? Stranger still, why had he not availed himself of his "marital rights," as that Dominican of my innocence had called it, and pushed himself up into me from behind, covered me like the stallion does the mare, uttered his low weird cries? He had never seen me unclothed. Did he not like what he saw, even though he had called me a "rose-tipped goddess?" Perhaps he found me repugnant. Perhaps he compared me to other women taller of stature, fuller of body, darker of hair or skin.

Hurt began to steal over me, along with resentment. He has no right to demean one for their looks. I was often praised for my delicate features, my unusual coloring, my elf-like appearance. Why would he scrutinize me so carefully and then walk away? Was there some flaw in me I'd never before noticed? My hands strayed over my arms, breasts, belly, soft and tender, and I stopped, panting. Everything felt dangerous, overwhelming. The pillows mocked me, mountains of desire. The sheet and coverlet conspired to molest me with surreptitious unwanted caresses. My own flesh sold me out. How dare it grow this strange alien opening which dripped moisture, bore an odd ocean smell, became a sea-purse into which might slide the swift pounding thrust of the man.

Bewildered, troubled, slippery of flesh, I slept.

I thought Erik would wake me in the morning with his soft call, "Christine, it's time to rise," but not this time. Voices came through the open front door, two men. One's was soft and lyric, patiently asking, explaining, I couldn't tell. The other voice, overriding and sharp, was Erik's. I crept mouselike to the front door, not wanting to be seen.

"You expect me to believe that?" the soft voice came.

"Believe what you like," Erik retorted. "You have decided to think the worst of me."

"You have to forgive me for being unsure. She's very beautiful, so much more so than on stage."

Erik exhaled a long dry hiss, and I shivered a little, because I knew the thinly suppressed rage which it implied. "You have no right to talk of her beauty."

"When women go about openly as they do in your country, my friend, their beauty is for all to sample," and he laughed a little. Then I knew who it was, the man who had met me in the passage. The one Erik called Daroga. "Did you take at least some of my advice?"

There was a long silence. "In your country, no one would blame me if I killed you for that question."

"Ah, but we are not in my country, are we?" The Persian man's voice rang like soft little bells. "That is obvious, with your barbaric European notions of architecture. Were she not in your rooms now, I would be sitting in front of your fire instead of shivering out here. Perhaps now you appreciate the convenience of our approach, keeping the women tucked comfortably away."

"Perhaps I will kill you anyway, you meddling fool, especially if you refuse to stay away from her."

"You haven't killed me yet. I consider that progress."

"Why do you persist in coming back?" As Erik's rage faded, it seemed like a little fear took its place. "You know how precarious my position is here."

"I would say you're very well-fortified. I'm almost dry now after that soaking. Thank you for saving me the disappointment of meeting my Creator, in any event. I had my doubts about whether there were really any gazelle-eyed beauties awaiting me in the beyond. But why did you stop?"

"I shouldn't have. There is a lot of water in that lake, and you wouldn't displace much."

"Erik, this bitterness is beneath you. Understand my position."

"I understand it perfectly. You showed up here in 1878, after how many years? Fifteen? I don't even remember anymore. You could have been dead for all I knew, but there you were, hanging on to that pompous windbag Nasir-al-Din when he dragged his tail through the muck of Paris. And you, so upstanding."

"Well," the other voice came lightly, "Our people were always more free in the capitals of Europe than at home. Do what you want in Paris, I remember my father saying, but just don't bring it back to Tehran."

"He should have told you not to bring Tehran to Paris, either. But as I was saying, when Nasir's retinue made a grand entrance into the Dancer's Salon you were right behind him, carrying his skirts. Paris still talks about it, how you wore a circlet of diamonds, how Nasir's braid on his uniform was really gold, and not just dyed rope. There you sat, several beauties hovering around each of you as the ballerinas bragged and chattered, each one more anxious than the next to draw your eye."

"You speak with such assurance, as if you were there."

"Oh, Daroga, I was. You did not see me, but I was. I hoped your delegation would take some of those brainless, noisy parrots back to Persia and stuff them into the gilded cages you had prepared for the women of your households, the ones who lived, at least. Instead, they sat on your knees and regaled you with stories of 'The Opera Ghost,' and you, Daroga, who have always hung suspended between belief and doubt, perked up your ears. Then that one line-dancer, now our exalted prima, the queen of the ballet corps, the white-armed Sorelli, chirped up that new trap doors had appeared throughout the backstage, and even on the main floor of the stage itself. I saw your face, Daroga, it was clearly in my view, and your eyes lit up with a fire that even La Sorelli could never engender in you. I don't know what you promised Nasir, to make him let you stay in Paris and hunt the man he thought had betrayed him."

"You did betray him."

"I had a right to leave your country. I was neither your slave nor your prisoner. He was ready to kill you right along with me."

"It was my weakness," and that gentle voice grew a hard, sharp edge. "Because you suddenly developed a conscience. You could no longer finish the tasks that had been assigned to you."

"As the Emperor's executioner."

"You were skilled at it. You did not protest. In fact, you seemed to relish it. How is it more barbaric than what you French do, when men slice each other with swords or shoot at each other with pistols over trivial matters of honor? Our courts had convicted those men. Have those tribunals less standing in your sight than your own?"

"I was blinded by sorrow. How can you still be unmoved, after all these years? You had a family, Daroga. I had none. My mother packed my things for me. She thrust them into a little bundle and said, 'Take these, leave, before he gets home.' I walked down the dirt road that led from our house and gazed back until the road curved and the house vanished from sight, but she did not even look out the doorway to watch my passing. You had not one mother, Daroga, but four."

"Don't idealize it. Mine cared for me, but the others would have as soon strangled me at birth."

"You had a home. And she was your sister. Can you forget that? Why should I have borne that sorrow alone?"

"I barely knew her, Erik. She grew up at my father's other house. She had a prestigious marriage arranged, and she destroyed it, destroyed everything in a moment of female weakness, foolishness. And the man she was to marry, the Khanum's nephew - he never forgot it, either."

"Which is how my drawings wound up in that diplomatic pouch, the one bound for the British embassy."

The other man gave a soft sigh. "What did you expect? Sooner or later he would have his revenge." Then his voice grew rich with entreaty. "You were a brother to me, Erik. But the Shah was my king, and we have a saying, our country is our mother. What was I to have done?"

"Trusted me. No one trusted Erik, not then, not now." That plaintive whine, I could almost see the expression on his face as he wailed it out, the mouth downturned, the eyes large black pits.

"You knew my responsibilities."

Their voices muted as they walked away from the door. A little later, the other man's musical voice said something like, "And what if she leaves you?"

Erik replied, sharp and fierce, "Then Lucifer will fall from heaven once more, and Paris will burn. But she will not. You will see." Then after more soft murmurings the Persian man's voice got suddenly sharp, then there was silence.

I sat, and the room seemed to contract around me. The Emperor's executioner? What did that mean? There was another reason the strange man looked familiar. Yes, he wandered the Opera House, a figure of fun for the opera girls now that he wore an odd sheepskin hat instead of a diamond circlet, and had traded diplomatic braid for a shabby black cloak. That wasn't it, though. He and she were children of the same father. His long almond eyes stared deeply like hers, the same eyes that rested in the face Erik had torn to shreds before me.

Erik came into the drawing room, tall and forbidding in his black afternoon coat. Anger hung over him and he slammed the piano lid open. "Time to get to work."

I didn't move. "That was a strange visitor."

"Nothing of your concern." He sat at the piano and kicked the bench with his heels, first one foot for a few staccato beats, then the other, but did not play.

"He seems like he would be a good friend," I said, trying to keep my voice low and even. "Yet you quarrel."

"What were you doing, listening at doorways? Another endearing characteristic of women, to always be spying."

"I thought you started your career as an architect helping women to better spy. Anyway, it was hard not to overhear."

"Leave it alone, Christine," he said coldly, and pressed out random plangent chords.

This line of conversation was hopeless. All my warm well-being gone, I shifted restlessly, feeling suddenly confined and constricted by my own indolent flesh, the too-warm fire, Erik's sullen hostility. "I thought you were going to play your _appassionata_ for me."

"You seemed to have dismissed my composition altogether, being more interested in that miserable Persian than my labors of the past two weeks." But after a few sulky moments he brought out the thick red _Don Juan Triumphant _folio, and began to play. He had rewritten his long lyrical arias so that they suited my voice as precisely as the best dressmaker fits a gown. Sound poured forth from me all through that afternoon and into the night with virtually no strain.

He spoke the truth, too, for the sections he wished to have played "passionately" were deeply so. He wove a spell of vision so that the events in his opera came to life behind my closed eyes. Flower-laden vines embraced a tower that glowed almost blue under a fat bright moon. As the flutes swirled like fireflies on the grass, the young man flung up a ladder and climbed, climbed, until he reached the window where his beauty sat. They sang, the moon shone, a soaring oboe solo marked their kiss, and they sang again afterwards. Neither noticed how her dark-bearded father crept on the ground below, the moonlight glinting ominously on his sword. Neither saw him stay his hand as the lovers took their leave. Neither heard the angry father's sharp intake of outraged breath as the lovers promised to meet again tomorrow, where they would flee the kingdom forever.

Later in the evening he played for me passages from the ballet. It was an unusual one. Men danced instead of women, but a parenthetical note in the folio said that female dancers in male dress could serve as a substitute. The dancers wore the long skirts and tall pointed hats of the Turkish "whirling dervishes," and they were to swirl around each other in elaborate patterns of reds and deep blue. In the margins he had little sketches of the dancers. The music built up, climbing higher to promise a fierce climax, but before that pinnacle was reached, Erik abruptly stopped.

In amazement I watched as he yanked down a drapery and tied it tightly around his narrow waist. Then, silently, listening only to the fierce throbbing rhythm in his head, he raised his arms and spun wildly to the music in his mind. Faster and faster he turned, so that the velvet "skirt" flared out almost parallel to the carpet. On and on he danced, circling to music none but he could hear. His rooms were gone, I was gone, there was nothing left except his devastating dedication to space and movement.

He made me dizzy, and a slow sick feeling spread through me. Never had I watched someone dive so deeply into the recesses of his own mind. A memory stole out from around a corner. Papa and I had just moved into the Valeriuses' Göteborg apartment. As I dried the breakfast dishes, a little noise caught my ear. There on the floor was a mouse, running in circles. I laughed, for the little creature seemed to be chasing its own tail, and I bent down to get a closer look.

Mama Valerius heard me laughing. She came in, took one look at the mouse, and pushed me away roughly. Broom in hand, swiftly she brought the straw bristles down on the little whirling creature. I cried out in anger and indignation. Again and again she hit, until it lay broken and still on the kitchen floor. I started to cry. She explained that it most likely had hydrophobia, nothing else would make a mouse spin like that out in the middle of the floor in the bright morning sunlight instead of skittering around the baseboards in the dark of night. If it had bitten me, she said, I could have died horribly. There was no medicine for hydrophobia, no cure, only the welcome release of death.

The poor mad mouse and the poor mad man spinning before me merged into one. Who was this man, and what yoke was I forging to bind myself to him? Was he as incurable as that poor creature squashed beneath Mama Valerius's broom?

He must have stopped while I was lost in my thoughts. His cessation of movement changed the air. Slowly he removed the drape, threw it aside, and without looking at me walked into his room and quietly, almost tenderly shut the door.

Later he emerged immersed in melancholy. I knew it was fruitless to speak to him when in that state. He took a small volume from the shelf, poetry, probably, but did not read to me as I expected. Instead he sat staring into the blue and gold flames with the book open in his lap.

His burst of fierce whirling activity followed by brooding silence made my skin creep with anxiety. I tried to read myself, but Erik could fill a room with his mood, be it elation or sorrow. No one was allowed to possess any other when he was in the thrall of his own. No longer could I relax mindlessly in front of the fire. Restlessness seized me. "I'm going out for a walk around the lake," I announced.

"No, you aren't," he said with a new heaviness I didn't recognize. "Sit down. Whether you walk or don't walk, do or don't do, it doesn't matter. In a week it will all be concluded anyway."

In a week I was to sing in Faust, in the coveted role of Marguerite. "What will be concluded?" I asked, trying to keep the irritation and the boredom out of my voice.

"My funeral Mass," he said to the fire. "It won't take long, not more than a week, certainly. And I bequeath it to you, so you will be free to use it as well."

Irritated and sick of his morbidity, I snapped, "And who's going to sing this funeral Mass for you?"

"Oh," he laughed a little, "the choir at the Madeleine, who else? It will be such a beautiful Mass. Shall we make it one coffin, or two?"

Vexed beyond measure, I stood up and announced that I was going to bed. Without waiting for his reaction, I headed for my room and shut myself in. For a long time I brooded in bed without sleep. When he tapped on the door I called out with irritated resignation, "Oh, come in if you must." Shyly he approached in his dressing gown, as he had the night before.

"Erik wants to see you again," he said in a voice full of embarrassment. It was his shame that made me cringe, while my breasts and belly and flanks trembled at the thought of being seen again in that way. So once again he uncovered me, and again I lay naked and exposed as a plump oyster on the plate, ready to slide down the throat. Again I stared at the courtesans of the Sun King, until the rustle of silk hitting the floor made me close my eyes.

The sound of a cork being pulled out of a bottle, another rustle of cloth, and a strange sweet odor caught my attention. I looked over without thinking and gasped, for there he stood naked below the waist, rubbing some kind of oil onto his maleness. The sight of that long reddened shaft squeezed a little moan of fear out of me. It was nothing like the innocent marble members of statues, discreetly sheathed and no thicker than a man's finger. I stared, and that unwinking merciless eye stared back at me out of an inflamed head crowned with bunched skin, a naked uncovered instrument of desire.

The pendulous sacs below contrasted veined and violet against the patchy whiteness of his thighs, those pale patches in turn broken up by darker skin covered with black hair. "Turn your head," he choked out, but far too late. "Erik only wanted to see you. You should not look on Erik or you will burn. But Erik wants you so badly, he does not want to burn you, that's why he risked you seeing him, oh, please let him in," and again he entreated me until I silently opened my thighs to him.

His nightshirt thumped on the floor. I caught another glimpse of his patchy, ragged skin with its alternating crazy-quilt pattern of mottled light and hairy dark. He mounted me. Then I cried out once more but not in pain, for in he slid smoothly and without resistance. The long spear of pain became an urgent thrust of heat. Almost against my will my flesh welcomed and pulled him in. He moved slowly, taking his time. I breathed in deeply and noticed he had bathed. Mixed with the sweet oily odor was one pungent and musky, but not unpleasant.

I remembered the Opera girls giggling around one little minx who said that with her lover, "It was far better the second time, you just want to forget about the first," and then I didn't think at all, for my body opened up to his deep slow pressure, and that secret place grew full and tightened around him, making him groan. His chest and belly slapped against me, and under each slap I opened to him further. Then, to my horror and delight, he pulled out almost entirely and slid in again, over and over, and each time he did, that hot thrusting pierced me right up the middle.

When he buried himself in me as deeply as he could, that was a different delectation, one which filled me from the inside out. Deeply embedded now, he pushed on with shallow tireless motions, and from far away a thundercloud of pleasure descended heavy and wet onto the horizon of my body. As he moved faster, tiny cries escaped from me and they filled him with wild delirium. Inside me he swelled with heat, burst, howled out my name, wailed without reserve.

He lay on me unmoving for a few seconds, his teeth resting up against my neck. As he shrank and withdrew, my flesh cried out silently in protest. Nothing could have forced me to say anything, so swollen was I with desire and shame at the same time, but I wanted to cry, Wait, there has to be more, this can't be it, no, wait.

"Erik will go now," he whispered. "Please turn your head, Christine, please close your eyes, don't look, Erik cannot bear it," and so I scrunched them tightly shut. He didn't even wait to put on his nightclothes, but simply grabbed them and left. Then I knew that his shame was as great as mine, greater perhaps.

As soon as he was gone, I staggered dripping to the tub, for his slippery gel coated my thighs and bottom. I was a creature possessed, and the slightest touch would have catapulted me across the room. Somehow in my tumbling thoughts, in chaotic flesh maddened with desire, it seemed that if I could get his slime off of me, somehow I would return to myself. Without even waiting for the tub to fill, I climbed in and worked great mounds of the lavender soap into the soft sponge to cleanse myself of his last trace. Over that hidden maw I slid it down, over that mouth which ached and cried for something unknown, which gabbled with a hunger I couldn't name.

At the first slide of the sponge a lightning bolt of pleasure crackled through me. Sensation mounted over sensation. Then against my will my body recalled him inside of me, felt once more his heat and slow, hard, rhythmic energy. That memory was too big for my flesh to contain, and as I stroked, something unbelievable happened. One wave of unimaginable delight overflowed and then another. As they poured forth they shook my legs and back, and then all of me.

Elation and terror pinned me down. It seemed that these wild convulsions would never stop. The secret heart of my body opened and closed, closed and opened, and to its great will I surrendered, possessed fully now by delight. Then the tremors weakened, and I pressed the sponge into that secret mouth of shame until the flutters echoed weakly, then faded away altogether.

In the bath I lay. I felt every drop of water on my flesh, every particle of air which filled my starved lungs, and then I knew. It's what he felt. It's what made him cry out like a dying animal caught in a trap. Yes, he loved me, and few women were loved as I was loved. It wasn't just love that drove him to me, though, but also the hunger for this convulsive pleasure of the body that only men and the most debauched of women sought.

I pulled my hands away in horrified shame, and the sponge plopped into the water. The rest of me moved heavily, placid and drugged with delight of a different sort. How many shades of pleasure were there in the body's palette? A sleepy well-being carried me on its stream in the lavender-scented bath, but underneath a tiny flicker of warning poked insistently. Then I knew as day follows dawn that those frenzied convulsions brought the mindless satiation which followed.

An image flashed before me. Years before, I had seen in the Louvre a painting of the Sabine women carried off by Roman soldiers. They struggled, they fought, but the strong men were made fierce by desire. The women weren't small like myself, either, but broad and big-hipped, the buttocks of one lapping over the arms of the man who bore her off. I had never understood before how they could have accustomed themselves to their fate, how they could have actually stood in between their fathers and their former spouses to fight for their new Roman husbands. Now I knew.

Margot's words came back to me. You have the heat in you, she said, and her words became clear. It was bitter knowledge, worse than when Erik had first split me apart with male flesh, because this I could not blame on him. Instead, the taint rose up from deep inside me. Had he gone on but a few seconds longer, this frenzy would have happened during the act itself. Like Erik, I too could come to crave this most indecent of pleasures. I too could ache for the flesh that bestowed it, as unlovely as that flesh might be to look upon, as tortured as the mind might be that animated it. And were he to lie with me and bring about such deep tumult, after it ceased there would follow the tender submission. With what resolve could I resist, if he lay on me while both of us basked in this soft glow?

Rings, words, these were nothing. Pleasure was the noose hanging before me. Pleasure would seal my fate and bind me to him forever. The game was over, the holiday concluded. I had left the nursery to join the adults at the table for the first time, and the banquet spread before me was not to my liking. I had to escape, before my body betrayed me.

(_continued.._.)


	19. White Roses

**White Roses**

**A/N: **_The atlante that appears to hold up the roof of the fifth cellar was borrowed from the 2004 POTO movie. _

The cool winds from the sea have turned into a sirocco of August heat blowing up from the south. A swan died in the King's garden yesterday and from the way the newspapers reported it, some would like to give it a state funeral. Gardeners all over Brussels collapse in the heat as they struggle to keep the brown and withering plants watered.

Two letters from M. Peillard greeted me upon my return from Paris. One was signed by his secretary and I settled the account at once. The other was personal, written in a flowing copperplate you see so rarely now in this modern typewriter age.

"_My dear Madame de Chagny,_

_Our morning visit was a bright spot in a dull August, so bright, in fact, that its luster has not diminished with the passage of time. At first I thought that I had offended you in some way by referring to strange events long buried in our National Opera's past, or perhaps I should not say "ours," as you have not lived in Paris for many years. But out of past affection for both our city and its crown jewel that sits at the center of all its roads, I thought perhaps you might want to claim its ownership as something we might share in common, even if for you it has been three decades since you made this fair place even fairer with your presence._

_After our conversation, it occurred to me that I had endured long without a respite from my solicitor's labors. In a happy coincidence of circumstance, I discover that I am both able to take a holiday and pursue my journalistic ambitions simultaneously. Le Monde has agreed to purchase a story on the upcoming state visit of the Prussian delegation to Prince Leopold of Belgium regarding the Prussian respect for Belgian's neutral status. Now to speak with Belgians and Prussians, one must go where they are, that is, to Brussels. The trite expression, to "combine business with pleasure" might seem on the surface to apply here, but it is not so, for if by business it is meant some disagreeable activity which contained no joy at all, in this instance it would be entirely erroneous. Madame de Chagny, it would be a pure multiplication of pleasures to be able to call on you as well as the Prussians. _

_Or if this is too forward a request, please disregard it entirely. I hope sincerely that you will not find it so, and remain,_

_Cordially yours,_

_Jacques Lalonde Peillard"_

It had arrived in a large envelope unfolded, and I recalled from long ago that one never folded a letter sent to royalty. I still haven't answered it.

Anki wrote, too. She, Philippe, and the children are all back together again in the breezy Grobbendonk farmhouse, and they want me to come to escape the heat. The children, she says, are sorting their seashells and like South Sea Island savages use them as money to buy toys and small favors from each other. Johannes had to have baths of weak tea to soothe his sunburn. Now, back from the seaside, they prepare to leave for London, and would I come to help? Further, can I accompany them to London for several weeks while they get settled?

So I prepare to close up my house, because it makes no sense to go to London, back to Brussels, and then to Perros. I can sail from London to Perros, and have trunks sent on ahead. I've rented a farmhouse away from the beaches now ringed with bathing resorts and hotels, and can walk the kilometer or so to the sea.

For Perros-Guirec calls me. The sea there in September and October is rough and grey, the rose-red rocks dull on overcast days, but those rocks are still beautiful to me, thrown about on the shore like balls or blocks discarded by giant children. The old women in black mourn husbands lost at sea or crushed beneath the daily load of farm work and I will sit beside them in the churchyard. I will remember one night of exquisite sweetness and pain when I thought the gates of heaven had really opened up before me, when my father and the angel whom he sent both pulled through my heart the strains of an enchanted violin. I don't know who possessed whom. Did an angel animate my imagination of my father, or did the spirit of my father infuse the body of a man pretending to be an angel?

It didn't matter, for that night I knelt in the snow before my father's iron grave-cross was the closest I have ever come to the other world. It doesn't matter that I soon found it out to be all lies and deception. Something came through Erik that night, something slipped in between his fingers and the strings, between the catgut and the bow. Something walked abroad on the beach, where Erik followed me but carefully hid out of sight behind the rocks, singing and sighing, only to slip away when Raoul called out and came upon me from behind.

Erik might not have been the angel of music himself, but that didn't mean there wasn't one.

Yesterday for the first time since Raoul's death I took a grey rather than black dress from my wardrobe. For propriety's sake I sewed two strips of black velvet on either side of the collar tabs. It felt shocking, almost provocative to go to our family's grave site yesterday in that soft dove grey. The white rose bushes that marked Raoul and Isabeau's plots were devoid of flowers as was usual for the season, but the rose hips weren't as firm and fat as I liked. I badgered the sexton until he brought two full cans and saw to the watering.

On a little stone bench I sat. Normally the willows grew right up to the edge of the pond, but the hot wind had done its work and between the water and the trees spread a broad expanse of browning grass. I tried to light two little candles in their votive glass to rest on their graves, but the hot wind kept blowing them out. What would make Raoul happiest? I wondered. A long boat came to mind, graceful of bow and full of sail, and at the helm he cut through a churning violet sea. Skillfully he threaded his way through islands scattered like beads of a necklace when the string breaks. Dressed as a little cabin boy, Isabeau ran free of all the limitations suffered by our sex as she scampered up and down the wooden deck, or climbed like a monkey up the mast to spy far horizons with her eagle-sharp eyes.

Then tears stung, so that I had to blink. These stories, are they not the sea-walls we construct to hold back the inevitable waves of the dark? Angels behind the walls of the dressing room, or the spirit of fathers who walk the earth and play the violin, are they all comfort without substance? Then Raoul was very close, almost as if he sat on the stone bench next to me, but instead of feeling comforted I shivered, suddenly very much alone. A man wrote me a letter, I told him in my heart, and I don't know what to do. Perhaps it's nothing. Perhaps I deceive myself. I love you, I said to him silently, I love you as none other because you were good and kind and so many beautiful lives walk the earth because of us, and not just the children you engendered, also the one you fathered in every sense but one, for Philippe is your son as much as Erik's.

There was a woman who died in the Opera many years ago, I told him. But you know that already, perhaps you have already embraced her in the fellowship of that other shore. I think she met her death at Erik's hands. It frightens me, my dead love, that Philippe touched with his fingers the bones of a woman that the father of his flesh had slain. I don't know why Erik killed her. Perhaps you have already found him and you know. I think she revealed his shame to him, either by taking off his mask or uncovering some even deeper stigma, and in a fit of despair and passion he slew her. So does our son need to know? Too many secrets have passed. Too many times did I turn away from him when all he wanted was to know. For like Erik, Philippe contains depths that most people do not plumb, and in his heart and mind I think he already suspects. Whom do I protect with my silence, my silent love? Him, or myself?

The peace of your rest is beyond any disturbance I might cause. But this man, another man, do you wish to rise and haunt him, to frighten him away? Do you wish to hold onto me even across the vast river of time that separates us? Should my heart stay closed and shut up, should I slip into black and grey obscurity, or shall the red thread run through me one more time before the dark breaks through the wall to wash over me for good?

No answer came. I walked over to the lake's edge without fear of staining my shoes in the marsh, for under my feet was only the brown baked grass. The faint green stench from the water reminded me of the lake under the Opera. M. Peillard in his letter said nothing about my singing history, nothing about digging in dead piles of old yellowed newspapers for articles about the infamous Mademoiselle Daaé, such a promising singer, she could have been another Swedish Nightingale, whatever happened to her? Perhaps he's saving it for our meeting, I thought, and then I knew that I would let him call on me when he came to Brussels for that boring diplomatic spectacle in which I had no interest. I trembled even though the day was far from cold, and a warm breeze stirred up little ripples on the placid surface of the green lake.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

That morning, the last in which I ever woke in Erik's rooms, I rose early and confronted him as he prepared to leave for the morning's marketing. I was going too, I said. He refused, and I insisted. I shivered a little, not knowing what he would do. But after a few more refusals, he sighed in resignation.

"Very well. But don't complain of boredom. Leave your fur and cover your head with a scarf, as I don't want to be mobbed by people who might recognize you."

He gave me a thick black knitted shawl to wrap around my head and shoulders, and out we went into the cold blue morning dusted with faint snow. I looked up into the cold wispy sky and thought, This is my first day of freedom.

"This was your mother's," I said, looking at the shawl's finely-knit wool stitches. He looked at fish spread out on a table, poked them, felt their gills just as I would have done, but he refused to answer. The fishmonger smiled at me, then commented, "So Monsieur, you have just gotten married, then?" He turned his ruddy face to me, smiling. "He must have let you stay in bed while he did the marketing, up till now at least." I blushed, embarrassed and a little guilty. This man knew Erik, and the fish he gave him were good, firm-fleshed and fresh. It didn't matter to him that Erik's nose was skewed and unnatural, or that his eyes were black-ringed as a polecat's. The fish seller looked me over frankly, and even under the heavy black wool I felt revealed. It will shame Erik when I leave, I thought. It will shame him in front of this man, and suddenly I felt sad and alone there in front of the crowded morning market stalls.

"It's just that he doesn't trust me with the purse," I answered, and the big man took it as a joke, for he smiled even wider.

"You have to trust her sometime," the fish seller said to Erik. "Some day you may want to lie in bed in the morning yourself. And some days the marketing doesn't get done at all." He winked, and Erik reddened a little. The man wiped a spot of blood off his hands onto his already-spattered apron, then turned to the woman next to us.

"Can't you keep silent?" Erik said under his breath as we looked over a pile of limp, brown-tinged artichokes.

Guilt made me irritable. "Why should I keep silent? I'm not a woman of Persia. Anyway, these aren't worth buying. They've been bitten by frost on their way to Paris. Look, these peas over here are better. Were they grown under glass?" I asked the woman in the kiosk.

She nodded. "We started them right before Lent. You won't find any fresher."

Erik glowered at me but bought the peas. "Were I unencumbered, this would take half the time."

"Some of those tiny potatoes, too," I pointed. "Look, they're like eggs, so small."

"Madame knows a value," the woman said, glowering back at Erik. I tied the potatoes up in my handkerchief.

"We need a basket," I remarked as we went up and down the street from stand to stand.

"Give your packages to me if you don't wish to carry them. Women, always complaining."

"Men, always complaining about women." A smell filled my nose, so like the bread he brought home fresh most mornings, a beautiful rich odor of yeast and butter and herbs. "Is this your favorite _boulangerie_? The breads you buy are wonderful."

He smiled a little then, just a softening of the mouth around the edges. A pang went through me. Why was it easier to like Erik once I had decided to leave him?

On the way back we stopped at a cheesemongers, where he picked a small white round, plump and blue-veined as the thigh of a goddess. It would go with the raisin loaf we'd gotten from the baker's.

He unwrapped and sliced in the kitchen, and quietly I slipped into my room, where I packed my things into my carpet bag. The dresses he had made for me I left hanging in the mahogany wardrobe, and the beautiful silk undergarments remained in the lingerie chest of drawers. It seemed wrong to take them. I debated a long time over the stockings, soft and shiny as a moth's cocoon, and finally stuffed them quickly in my bag before I could change my mind.

He had already told me that after the performance of _La Juive_ I was to go home until the next week's performance of _Faust_. I looked for my papers, the suicide note, a letter I'd started to Raoul, the strange random notes I'd made the night of the Masked Ball, some pages I wanted to paste into my daybook at home, but none of them were there. All that remained were a few pieces of the gold-edged ivory stationery, and what was now a stub of the golden pencil. He's taken them, I thought. I could go look in his room, I know where he keeps his papers, in a sliding-door cabinet next to the organ. Mine are next to his, I can almost see them.

Let him have them, I sighed to myself as I rested my carpetbag down by the front door. They will either comfort him, or he'll burn them. But I will write him, a long letter, to explain everything. Everything that I can explain, that is.

"Why do you want me to stay with Margot and Mama Valerius next week?" I asked as I sipped the foamy Turkish _kahvese_, trying not to burn my tongue. The blue-streaked cheese was soft instead of crumbly, and it spread like silk over the raisin-thick bread.

"Why do you make me repeat myself endlessly? I'm finishing my funeral Mass, and when I work, I like to work uninterrupted. Besides, I have a shipment that awaits delivery."

"A shipment?"

"Do you think I make automata simply for my own amusement, to scare ballet girls trysting with stagehands? I know you have avoided my workroom," and here he hung his head, for it saddened him that I would not look any longer at his rubber and silver creations. "If you cared to put your curiosity to better use than you do, you would see that I am ready to make a delivery, and it would be better were you not here. I can hardly think that such boring business would hold your attention."

"Not to offend you, Erik, but I hate how they look. Their eyes just stare at you, yet they're blank, because there's nothing behind them."

"These particular ones are not humanlike automata," he said. "They're more specialized than that. Think of them as fulfilling the functions of arms and legs. They're really most ingenious. Are you sure you would not like to see them?"

The last thing in the world I wanted was that. Images flew across my mind of severed body parts, of arms that dragged themselves across the floor, of hands that scuttled behind cabinets, of legs that twitched or worse yet, hopped across the room of their own accord. "Not now," I said, feeling the blood leave my face. "I don't have to see every sign of your genius to believe in it, Erik."

He mused over me, weighing me with his sight as thoroughly as his hands had tested the substance of my breasts. "I love you for your belief," he said. "In the final moment before death takes me, in that moment when death will take us both, because I cannot imagine dying without you, Christine, in that final moment what I will take into hell with me is the certainty of your belief, and though I crackle like a roast on the spit, I will hold your belief close to my heart and it will cool me even in the midst of the flames."

A little anger shot through me, and then I saw that he did not mock. I said lightly, "Hopefully you won't take yourself into hell at all. Not that you believe in hell, anyway."

He laughed. "You believe in so many things, not just me. It is piquant, bittersweet."

"Whose fault is that? Who told me he was an angel?"

"Did I ever say that exactly? I don't recall it that way. You heard into it what you wanted to. If you believed that, it was drawn from the well of your own mind."

"That was true for a time, Erik, until that day I asked you flat out if you were the Angel of Music of whom my father spoke, and you agreed."

"You were immature then, still in so many ways an adolescent. As old as you were, you could not tell metaphor from literal fact. For you cannot deny that I was your 'angel of music' in a sense. Did I not inspire your voice, win for you a triumph of which Paris still speaks, a triumph which you will repeat tonight? To say that I was your 'angel' - I believe the priests call it 'mental reservation.'"

"Another term for lying."

He set his coffee cup down and looked at me with a fierce glittering gaze. "Just what did you think was going on?"

"I don't know," and suddenly it all seemed so cheap, so much a farce, a bad comedy. "Do you know how much I hated the ugliness all around me?" I said, and he drew back, tears starting in his eyes. "No, no, don't misunderstand me, no. I mean the ugliness of this city. The ugliness of my life. Did it occur to you that perhaps your pretence of being a disembodied spirit was the only joy I had? The only beautiful thing I could take with me throughout the day?" He looked blankly at me, so I went on. "I wanted it to be real. I wanted there to be something beautiful, just something, somewhere, that wasn't a story or a myth or a picture or a statue, but that was real. I thought it was you."

"I am real," he whispered.

"Of course you are," I said, twisting the ring around on my finger. It felt very loose. I'd better be careful, I thought, or I will lose it, and then that particular anxiety seemed ridiculous. You'll have to give it back. How will you do that? What will you say? and suddenly this new idea, this bid for freedom seemed like the foot-stomping of a child who tells his mother he is running away from home, but will be back by tea-time.

"I grow restless," he said. "Let's walk along the lake, for the walls close in on one."

We went out to that glistening shore. "Shouldn't you shut the door behind you?" I asked.

He laughed. "Erik has his traps. No thief is going to get past my gatekeepers."

We went away from the Rue Scribe path towards the rowboat which lay tied to a little stone pier. In dismay I protested, I didn't want to get in the boat and get my skirts wet, but he gestured towards another path around to the side. We went on a walkway of flat paved stones until we came to an open cavernous area, and in the center of the lake stood a great square column many meters thick. Out of the mute stone he had carved out only the roughest outline of a massive man who seemed to hold the entire weight of the ceiling above him on his shoulders.

"Atlas," I breathed out. "Erik, it's magnificent. It looks as if it has been here centuries."

"All monuments come to an end. All cities, all temples, all are simply stones piled upon stones, and piles can be toppled, and will be."

"That's a dismal thought."

"It is a real thought," he answered. "You said earlier you hungered for the reality beneath the dismal surface of the world. You are always asking about Persia, well, this story I will tell you as we walk has the advantage of being both real and about Persia."

So we circumscribed the lake with the great Atlas at its center, and around that mighty form the whole vast cellar seemed to turn. Erik's voice grew lyric and beautiful as it always did when he told a story.

"A king went out to battle against a host far more powerful than he. Because weather, the courage of his men, and fortune all smiled upon him, he took the field. However, when he rode out across the battle plain and saw the broken standards, the trampled flags, and the crushed and bleeding bodies of the defeated host, he grew sad instead of joyful. That very day he called half of his wise men to his private chamber.

"The first half heeded the summons and dressed in their brightest robes, thinking the king had called them to his chambers to celebrate. They brought wine and sweetmeats, and entered the king's chambers laughing and chattering like the ravens that feasted on the fallen. The king took one look at them and sighed. 'O Magi,' he said to them, taking note of their fat glistening faces and greedy hands, 'I have brought you here to satisfy a most urgent request. I want you to tell me something that will always be true, no matter what shall pass in either heaven or on earth.' Confused, the men looked at each other, at the paintings of dancing girls and lovers entwined on the walls, but there were no answers there. They eyed the wine they'd brought, but the king made no move to pour any.

"Finally the oldest said, 'Oh Pivot of the Universe, this can always be said with utmost certainty. You, O Shah, will always be victorious over your enemies, just as you were today.' Upon that, the angry king tossed their tidbits out the window to the dogs that roamed below, ripped the tall embroidered caps from their heads and had them thrown into prison.

"The second group came in the next day. No doubt they had heard of the fate of the first, and so they wore their most sober garments of dark yellow, for that is the Persian color of mourning. They came with little whips in their hands, preparing to weep and flog themselves over their shoulders, just for show of course, as their whips were made of silk and would not bruise the skin of even the tenderest child. Again the Shah posed the same question, and again the men pulled their beards and shot perplexed glances to each other.

"Shaking, the eldest of them finally said, "O Foundation Stone of the World, this will always be said. You, O Shah, will always experience the happiness you feel on this day of your greatest triumph." The king, no longer angry but rather filled with the cold deliberation of rage, threw their silk whips into the fire, ripped their magi's hats from their heads, and had the guards give them thirty-nine lashes each with catgut tipped at the ends with lead balls.

"Then the whole court trembled with fear, for there were no wise men left, and the king neither ate nor slept as he struggled with his question. Finally, as he sat one day on the Peacock Throne with his beard untrimmed and his face haggard, he heard a great disturbance in the outer court. 'We found this man spinning in circles in the courtyard,' his guards said. 'We tried to throw him out, but he insisted on seeing you. We told him the Shah-in-Shah had no time for piles of rags such as him, but he insisted that he could tell you the answer to the question you sought.' Then the guards bowed and retreated backwards a little, for one never turns his back on the Shah.

"The man came forward, dressed in long skirts of brightly colored wool scraps all stitched together, and only rope sandals on his feet. He smiled at the king, who said wearily, 'Are you not afraid to meet the fate of my magi?' The patchwork man just smiled. 'Lay before him refreshment,' the king commanded, and a slave set down strawberries with powder-fine sugar to sprinkle over them.

"The man washed his hands but did not eat. 'I have the answer you seek,' he said, picking up a pinch of the powdered sugar and blowing it with a puff into the king's face. As sugar flew up in a cloud, the guards pulled their swords and the women behind the screen cried out in terror. But the king laughed long and hard, and the ragged man laughed with him. 'This too shall pass,' the king finally said, and the other man nodded. 'This can be said in all times, in all places. This too shall pass away.'"

Erik stared at me, waiting. I looked at the rough-hewn stone man, and all of the weight of the entire structure seemed to fall on his columnar shoulders as he rose pillar-like out of the great wide lake. "It's hard to believe this place could ever fall down."

"Some of the ancients believed that perfection must be destroyed, lest it spoil and tarnish with time, thus losing the title of perfection. Rather than wait for time to bring about the fall, they brought it about themselves when at the zenith of their accomplishments, rather than at the nadir."

"Then no one would make anything at all, because everything spoils if you leave it out on the shelf long enough."

"A blaze of light, or slow decay?" he said, but not to me. It sounded as if he were deciding something. Before, it would have made me impatient. Now I serenely watched Erik drift away into his own thoughts.

"Erik, there's something I'd like you to tell me. Why did you leave Persia? And why are you and Daroga no longer friends?"

He rounded on me, suddenly angry. "Why do you care about that pathetic Persian?"

"It's not that I care about him so much. But his story lies close to yours. I want to know."

"So I am now your Scheherazade, and for every story I tell, another day goes by when you do not kill me?" He sighed heavily, an emotionless sorrow of the kind when one no longer has any hope, and his face was still angry. "It is a small price to pay, although it merely staves off the inevitable. Kill me you will, for someday you will leave me, and on that day we will both die."

Fear leapt to my throat. "What? What are you talking about?"

"Tell Erik," he said. "Swear to Erik that you won't leave him." He gripped my arm and I saw myself suddenly at the bottom of the lake.

"I can't swear to that," I said, thinking as fast as possible. "For instance, I might die first. Then you might say that I had left you." I swallowed, hard, and he saw it. He gripped tighter, and I squirmed. "Don't, that hurts. Do you want me to go on stage with a black and blue arm?" and he dropped it as if it were a coal.

"Yes," he said, not touching me now but riveting me with his eyes, "that would be one way for you to leave me. There's an easy answer for that one, though. So much better to lie down in the coffin together, wouldn't you say? No bereavement, no mourning, no long years of despair at the other's passing."

What was this mad talk? "It's not always so easy to arrange," I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking. He folded his arms and walked away with that resolute stride which told me he had no more to say. I trotted a little to catch up with him. "I want you to tell me why you left Persia," I insisted, anything to brush aside this gloomy and baffling turn of the conversation.

"Very well," he said as he slowed down. "Scheherazade will sing once more, even if it is only to mention that worthless Persian, and only since you insist. Even in his own country he was a nonentity, a failure. He was supposed to help me with the Golestan prison, although I ended up doing all the work. Then the Khanum decided he needed a wife. She made for him a much better match than his father could have, but he hadn't even the initiative to find another two or three for himself. And that wife gave him only a few miserable girl-brats before she died."

He headed for a narrow stairway that wrapped part of the lake shore, and I groaned inside at another slippery climb. At the highest point he called out in ringing bell-like tones, "Are you skulking about, Daroga? We're going to talk about you, perhaps you'd like to come out and listen." Only his echoes answered.

Then we walked through a cloister-like passageway covered with a series of low curved arches, with a wall on one side, and the lake on the other. He spoke to walls, to the lake, to anywhere but me. "My friend the Daroga and I had built for the Shah his courthouse and prison. It was full of obscure passages, entrance ways, as well as listening chambers and stations all around. The drawings were supposed to be kept in a locked room, guarded by men hand-picked by Nasir himself. But Nasir had a weakness for boys with beautiful long black locks and melting smiles. It turned out that his infatuation of the moment was such a one whose name was Ayaz. This Ayaz was also the close friend of the Khanum's nephew, that derelict. This beautiful young man the Shah put in charge of guarding the document room.

"I never found out exactly how it happened, but one morning before the sun even had a chance to bake the dust of the courtyards, guards pulled me from my bed. They ignored my protests, saying it was on the Daroga's direct orders, and they dragged me before Nasir himself. The Shah's mother sat behind a screen, whispering loudly to the few other women with her, and I could feel her glee.

"I wasn't the only one whose sleep had been interrupted that morning. Seated across from me, terrorized and sweating, was the Persian court official who served as the British liaison, the man who carried messages between the two Crowns. Ayaz threw down a large leather bag full of folded-up drawings onto the table between us. They were mine, architectural diagrams of all the concealed exits, entrances, and tunnels of the new prison. I see your face, Christine, you are as bad as the Persians themselves. You think I would sell out to the English? There's no point in continuing."

"Please," I said. "I did wonder, given what you've said in the past about kings and emperors."

"The liaison officer of course pleaded innocent, as did I. To determine who was lying, Nasir decided to throw us both into prison for 'interrogation.' Nasir liked to think of himself as an enlightened monarch, and while his prisoners were tortured, he declined to use the word itself." He stopped and leaned up against a square stone column, barely holding onto his control.

"Oh, Erik," I said, lost for words.

"They didn't get far with me, as they spent a great deal of time arguing as to whether the French embassy should be notified first. Some said yes, because the embassy would most certainly leave me to my fate if I were thought to be spying for the British, and others said, no, go ahead and find out the truth before telling them, in the event the French embassy would mount a protest. Meanwhile, the screams of the liaison were piped into my cell daily by arts of my own design, to win my cooperation and brighten my stay. He shrieked for three days. Later when a very angry guard brought me the day's rotten fish and moldy rice, he threw in the tidbit that the diplomat had suddenly expired, and they could get nothing more useful out of him. It seemed it would be my turn next."

"I don't understand. Why would the British even want your plans?"

He shrugged in exasperation. "Because, you foolish _naif_, the Persians had just lost their eastern territory to British guns. They were terrified of an English invasion, fearful of being made a vassal state like Egypt or India or the Kingdom of Afghanistan. That's why Nasir tolerated the French, as they were a kind of buffer against the British."

I rubbed my head, trying to piece it all together.

"I never knew why my friend came for me that fourth night at such terrible risk to himself. He had drugged the guards, and killed the young long-locked Ayaz with his own hands. We carried the dead Ayaz with us, and it was terribly hard, as the body was heavy. We traveled by oxcart, dressed as farmers. When we got to the Caspian seacoast a little boat was waiting. I watched my Persian friend dress Ayaz's corpse in my clothes, then mutilate the man's face and the rest of his body besides. They left him on the shoreline for the crabs to finish off the rest.

"A coracle not much bigger than a washtub bore me north to Baku, where I sheltered for a time with Azerbaijani Turks who had long memories of wars with the Persians and admired my escape. It was they who helped me find my way to Constantinople. My friend went back to the Golestan with a dramatic tale of pursuit, thwarted at the end by my unfortunate drowning, washed up on the shore to be pecked to shreds by the sea-birds. The Khanum didn't believe it for a moment, of course, but there wasn't much she could do, and anyway, it slaked her nephew's thirst for revenge even as he and the Shah both mourned the loss of one they loved."

"So you didn't see your friend after that."

"Not until we met quite by chance in Paris, after the _Exposition Universelle_ in 1878, where he was attached to the Persian delegation."

"And so he stayed in Paris."

"Yes," Erik said, with tiredness or irritation, difficult to discern in the gloom. "And so he stayed, and betrayed me. He told the Grand Oubliette of the Universe that he suspected I was still alive, simply so he could remain in Paris at his government's expense. You see how he wronged me."

"Erik," I said, "from all that you have told me of Persia, I don't blame your friend for not wanting to go back there."

He whirled around, eyes blazing gold in the dim gaslight, his tone knifelike. "Do you dare take his side against me?"

"Of course not," I said, suddenly afraid.

"Then keep silent, as you know not of what you speak. He arrested me in Persia and allowed me to sit in prison, waiting for my turn to be chained to the block, to suffer under the hooks and the knives. Why should he not betray me now to his king?"

"He has not, so far," I reminded him. "Besides, from your story, he saved your life."

"And he never lets me forget it, either. Always harping, always picking, always reminding me of that. One day he will infuriate Erik beyond all reason, and Erik will not be responsible."

We walked back to the house by the lake in silence. He shut himself in his room, and when I walked by his door once, I thought I heard the muffled sound of weeping.

o o o o o oo o

I didn't return that afternoon to the dark long apartment on Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Instead I went directly to my dressing room, where I packed a few more things into my worn upholstered bag. On the dressing table lay a pair of fine grey gloves. So many relics of Erik, everywhere I looked. I took out the stockings and shoved them into one of the dressing table drawers, cringing as they snagged on a splinter of wood.

I picked up one of the gloves, and as I fingered its supple leather, a thought struck me like a wet fish across the face. Were I to leave Erik, Margot would leave, for I could not pay her. From her I got the distinct sense that Erik paid well, far better than what most men would have. She had not told me her earnings, but bragged more than once that no other nursemaid in Paris drew what she did. There was no word from M. Richard on any additional contracts. Worries, apprehensions, fears all fought for the forefront of my imagination. Mama could be left alone for short periods, and with Adèle for a little longer. But what would happen in the future? I had heard stories of elderly people who wandered down the center of the boulevards, or blew out gas lamps thinking they were candles, and then lit a match. And if Mama could not be left alone, how could I work?

He must get a lot of money for his "shipments" to afford all this, I said to myself. These thoughts stayed with me as I stood on the dais in one of the costume shops, where a pert seamstress pulled and snipped and stuck me with pins to punctuate her running chatter. Finally she had me as she wanted me. "See, good for you taking that long holiday. You've even got a bit of _embonpoint_ now, and we know that's what the gentlemen all come to see, don't we? On your last fitting, I thought I would have to find some _fillets_ to push you up a bit, but no. That's good. Last year I had a girl who lost one right on stage. She leaned over and it fell right out, and someone kicked it into the pit. It landed on one of the cellists, but he didn't miss a note. This blue velvet," she went on, "perfect for your hair. Now we unpin you, and I stitch. You could have come in earlier, you know."

I swept through the performance of Halévy's _La Juive_ like an automaton myself. Carolus Fonta sang the Jew Eléazar, who had found his adopted daughter Rachel as a tiny infant, crying in the burning house of his greatest enemy, the Italian magistrate Brogni. Eléazar raised the infant girl as his own as a Jewess, not telling her of her Christian origin. But when as a woman she loved a Christian man, he allowed her to be cast into the flames rather than reveal her true parentage.

But Eléazar was no embodiment of evil. When Fonta drew his short frame up to his full height, flung his wiry shoulders into an attitude of deepest despair, and mourned from the heart his decision to let Rachel die unknowing for the crime of loving a Christian, all other hearts were moved, and mine too. As I peered at him from backstage, the tears ran down my cheeks unchecked. A little wardrobe mistress shook her head silently as she passed, and returned with a box of powder. Foolish woman, she seemed to say, you've heard this scores of times, why cry now, as she patted my cheeks dry. Yet Halévy's tale of a despondent, despairing man who would kill the one he loved rather than see her with someone else rang through me like a mourning bell.

After escaping the deafening applause I fought my way towards the costume wing. The critic from _Le Temps_, the one who had mocked me not more than six weeks ago by saying, "It is as if she has fallen in love for the first time," wedged me into a corner of the hallway. Bound by the wall behind me, the crowds to either side, and his vast bulk which refused to let me pass, I choked on his champagne-scented breath laced with cigar smoke. Then I saw he was drunk and wobbling, and pushed him aside easily. "Wait!" he called. "Don't you want to hear what I have to say?"

Against my judgment I paused and turned around. The crowd around me stopped to stare. "Speak," I said. "But don't block my path like that."

His stomach swayed a little, then the rest of him followed. "Miss Daaé has indeed fallen in love, as we suspected," he grinned. "But we maintain that her lover is Death himself, for never has a Rachel gone to her demise with such rapture in her eyes, such glory in her voice, such dedication in her heart."

A few people laughed. "Brava, la Daaé!" some others cried. Almost blind with tears now, I pushed my way through the crowd and turned up the wrong corridor, traveling along one that led me back to the rotunda rather than to the privacy of my room. A few other critics were encouraged by the first one's success at attracting my attention and followed, calling my name. Someone stepped on the back of my costume and it ripped. Crying now in earnest, I turned around and forced my way through the crowd. The admiring sighs of just a few moments before turned to indignant remarks, "What's she doing?" "She's lost her mind." "He's not one to insult, certainly." "She's let it all go to her head."

A warm arm went around me and pulled me up against a solid, firm side, and for a second I fought. "Christine," he said under his breath, "Christine, follow me," and a cool hand took mine as the resolute man wound his way through the crowd. It was Raoul in full dress uniform, and the crowd parted to let him pass. Braid sparkled on his chest as he strode through the throng, pulling my hand but not hard or forcefully. A few journalists and other hangers-on followed us to my _loge,_ but they pursued at a respectful distance. "Give us an interview, Lieutenant!" one called out. "A naval officer," said another. "That'll make a good read tomorrow."

I tried to insert the key in the lock several times but couldn't, so Raoul took it from my trembling fingers and tried himself. The crowd milled about the door, pushing into us. One stout woman waved her libretto in my face, begging for an autograph. Raoul's hands shook too, but he finally managed to get the jammed lock to release. He waved me into the room, then turned one fierce final look on the crowd. "She knows how to entertain her guests, I imagine!" came one catcall, then another. In disgust Raoul slammed the door in their faces, and the laughter and shouting died away.

"Do you have any brandy?" he asked.

I sank down onto the sofa, face in hands. "You want brandy now?"

"Not for myself. But you could use some."

There was a little in a bottle in the sideboard, left over from my first night at the National Opera, when Fonta and a few of the chorus women came to my room and drank a toast for luck. "I don't have any proper snifters," I said as I waved Raoul over to it. "You'll have to use tumblers."

He smiled. "That's no difficulty," and brought two for us. He sat next to me, and raised his glass. "To the most splendid Rachel I have ever heard or seen." I paused, and he misinterpreted my hesitation. "Just a taste. It will calm your nerves, and I can't see a few sips hurting your throat."

With a weak smile I obliged him.

"I have never heard you like that," he went on. "I thought you were remarkable the night of the inaugural, when you sang Juliette. But tonight you surpassed yourself. It must have exhausted you, you look so pale and wan, and you were so full of passion and energy before."

The brandy went down smooth and warm. I could still hear footsteps and laughter in the halls, but fainter now. "They're waiting for you out there, you know. Waiting for you to leave, so they can follow you."

He glared at the door, then set his glass down on the side table. "It's like a _charivari_," he grumbled. "Next thing you know, they'll start banging pots and pans," and I gave a little shiver. "You're still in costume," he said, and suddenly I was intently aware of my bare arms, my exposed neck. "Did you want to …" and he looked at the curtain which concealed the little boudoir.

"Do you mind?" I asked. It took me a long time to get out of Rachel's garment. A few buttons flew across the room, and I scrambled to pick them up. There was no bed in my boudoir, just a sort of couch or day-bed piled with cushions, and I looked at it longingly, weighed down with fatigue. All I had in my wardrobe was the soft grey dress Erik had made for me, and a morning wrap. To appear before Raoul in the morning robe seemed faintly indecent, but I didn't want him to see or compliment Erik's dress. I quickly cleaned my face and emerged to find Raoul pacing across the small room.

"That blue becomes you," he said, and blushed a little at my robe.

"Blue becomes you as well," I answered. "I've never seen you in your braid."

"One of my senior officers, Commodore Delacroix, invited me to join him in his box. His wife accompanied us as well," and then he blushed genuinely, down to the roots of his bright hair. It wasn't the officer's wife who had made him blush like that, I knew.

"And someone else," I remarked.

"It was a bit of an ambush, I will admit. Her niece."

"But there you were in the hallway. You didn't go to supper with them afterwards," and it struck me, the niece must have been terribly hurt. I saw him through the eyes of this unknown girl, and a great sorrow washed over me.

Raoul took my hands. "I claimed fatigue, a sick headache. I wanted to see you," and his words tumbled out heedlessly. "Two days ago, when you didn't write, I thought you had left Paris for good and that I should never meet you again, that you'd finally done it, and whatever terrible bargain you had made with … with that man had finally been fulfilled."

"Hush," I said, shaking despite the brandy. "Please don't speak of it."

"Then my brother told me you were performing the next evening, and it was as if hope returned, as if life itself had come back to me." He pulled me towards him, and a great battle began on the field of my heart. Pull away, one side said. There's no purpose. He will never marry you, not when commodores of the French Navy are waving their nieces under his nose and inviting him to supper. There will be hell enough to pay tomorrow, when Madame Commodore and her niece read the gossip about how Lieutenant Raoul de Chagny disappeared into the dressing room of a notorious singer. I rested my head under his chin and he stroked my hair tenderly, brushing a few strands away from my cheeks. A little grease paint that I had missed stained his fingers, and I fumbled for my handkerchief. "Never mind," he said, and when he lifted my face, the other warring faction took the field. He loves you, the bright general under that banner said. Even if he will not marry you, he loves you, and isn't this what you wanted? To have someone take you away?

It would be possible, I thought, and the emotion made me swoon a little. His hands were soft on my hair, fingers exploring around my ears, and he played with my teardrop earring. I thought he would kiss me, for his mouth hovered that close and the kiss inside struggled to get out, but he pushed it down and instead brought me down to his chest, where he held me close and rocked me back and forth. I squirmed a little and he said, "What's wrong?"

"A brass button, sticking in my cheek."

"Such a tender cheek," he said, and brushed it with his lips and soft moustache. Then he looked at me soberly, full of intent. "You will laugh at me, perhaps, but I must tell you. Christine, I want to kiss you, so badly that it burns me. But I have never kissed a woman before, not counting my sisters and aunts, of course. Never have I given a woman the kiss of love. No, don't turn away. You know I love you. I had promised myself not to tell you, not to burden you with it, because you are not free. But you are so beautiful, and I love you so much that it tears through my heart." Then he twisted away. "No, don't rest your hand on my breast like that, I can't bear it."

"No man has kissed me, Raoul," I said. "Not counting Papa, of course."

"Then why this vow?"

"You have never made a vow?"

"I did," he said, all seriousness now. "When I was seventeen. My brother, as you know, is a dedicated man-about-town, and my sisters were always asking him when he was going to marry. My uncle Comte August de Chagny was becoming bitter about my brother's unmarried state. But Comte Philippe lived, and still lives, largely for pleasure. I don't complain, that's not my purpose in telling you this. I remember the afternoon so clearly. I went to confession and afterwards lit a candle to Our Lady, and promised her that day that I would only give my heart to the woman who would become my wife. So many men in the academy and of my class dallied with mistresses, and they mocked me. For there was another part of that vow, and I prayed to her that she would help me keep it, that not only would my heart be pledged to my wife, but my body as well."

I shook my head, and he looked up, anxiety over all his features now. "Laugh," he said. "Everyone else does. You should have heard my brother when I told him in a fit of enthusiasm, when I forgot that this kind of vow is never to be spoken of, but meant to be kept in the heart alone and lived. Now this is the second time I've spoken of it, and you no doubt would like to join the chorus."

"No," I whispered. "That promise is very beautiful. But I'm not worthy of it."

He pulled me to him again, harder this time. "Do you know why I don't kiss you?"

Looking away, I said, "Because you are afraid you will not stop."

"You know my heart as if you lived inside it."

"Don't stop," I whispered. "Why should you stop?"

He stood up, and a blaze of white and gold, blue and scarlet filled the room. "From this sofa to the couch in your bedroom is perhaps five steps. I'm not a statue, Christine. My heart isn't glass or ice." Then he swooped down and in one swift, exhilarating movement picked me up, crushing me against the buttons and braid on his chest. "Five steps, and I make you my mistress." He laughed, a little wild now. "That would make everyone happy, wouldn't it?" He spun me around, as if making for the boudoir, and his mouth was very close to mine. "You hold me in the palm of your hand, and even now you do not struggle. You don't call out, you don't fight me." Closer he put his face to mine, and ran all over my cheeks and nose with his lips until I closed my eyes and sighed, mouth half-open. Kiss me, I willed, put your mouth on mine and I will leave with you tonight, leave with you forever, anything you want.

He gave a great sigh himself, and set me down gently so that I stood before him like a penitent, eyes closed, listening to him breathe.

"Why do you stop?" I whispered, hiding behind my eyelids, not wanting to look at how bright he was.

He tilted my face up gently, and brushed my mouth with his fingers. "Because you are not free. Because you do not love me. Because you will not marry me."

"You can't marry me. You are as bound as I am."

"We shall see."

I sank to the couch and he knelt at my feet, resting his head on my knee. "What are we going to do, Christine?"

"I don't know," I answered, wanting to stroke his hair but unsure now, unsettled about everything.

"I'm not your fiancé. I won't pretend to be any longer."

"No, of course you can't."

"I should walk out of here and never see you again. That is what a sane man, a rational man would do. But I have been neither sane nor rational since the first evening I saw you perform, when I first read your name in the program."

"Which night was that?" I said, a little ashamed that I had never asked.

"You sang Zerlina in Mozart's _Don Giovanni_."

"The night I understudied," I said, at once all ice inside. "The singer had been killed that day, a horrible thing. We didn't know until intermission. All I knew at first was that she hadn't shown up for her costuming. But when the news hit backstage, the whispering started almost at once that I was unlucky, a jinx, as if I'd done it myself. I could barely sing in the second act for the shock."

"I never noticed you were shocked," Raoul said. "Put your hand on my hair like that, yes, just like that. It didn't matter to me how you sang, for I only saw how beautifully you moved. Philippe cringed once or twice and remarked that you looked distracted, that your voice was cold for such a warm peasant girl, but I ignored his carping and complaining. They guillotined the man recently, you know. Her husband."

"It's just horrible," I said. "I don't want to think about it." He pulled himself to his feet and reached for his hat. He's going to leave this time, I thought. When he goes through that door I will not see him again. He'll go on board his ship. Or perhaps he'll marry his Commodore's niece and she'll use her aunt's influence to keep him in France, where I'll sing at some admiral's party and watch him from across the room.

He held his hat but made no move to put it on. "I want to see you tomorrow. Not in these rooms, nor in yours. I want you to come out with me, stroll through the _Jardin du Luxembourg_, get some sun and wind on your face."

"I can't, Raoul. You know that. I'm not to leave the Opera with you." Desperate, I searched. "I know what we could do. Have you ever been up in the flies, in the fly-tower above the stage?"

He looked at me, irritated at having been refused, but eyes glistened with interest. "Have you?"

"No," I admitted, "but I would like to. If you look up from the stage, it seems to go on forever, a castle in the sky full of ropes and wheels and gears. Let's go, please? Anyone can walk through a garden, but to go up into the fly-tower…"

He gave a little bow, the play back in his eyes. "Mademoiselle, I would be glad to accompany you to the forest of the flies. Now, tell me where your coat is so that I can fetch it for you."

"My coat?" I said, confused.

"You're not going to stay here all night, are you? It's unthinkable you should go home alone. You're coming with me. My carriage hasn't gone anywhere, the coachman's a good man, and so you'll ride with me to your apartment."

Erik never mentioned this possibility, I considered. I may see Raoul in the Opera, and in my apartment. He never forbade transiting with him between the two places.

The night had warmed, and Raoul's gentleman's brougham sat two, and was snug inside. We passed by the _Opera Comique_ and sat in the throngs that had just emerged. He took my hand and caressed it as we talked of our upcoming meeting. Then he put his arms around me and I nestled into him, glad for the thickly congested streets, the carriages waiting in line to cross the boulevards, the party goers from a cabaret who spilled out by the dozens and walked heedlessly down the center of the street, laughing and rollicking as if it were still Carnival season.

The coachman called from outside, "It's a mob scene, Monsieur le Vicomte, all the way up ahead as far as I can see. Would you like me to turn off and try a side street?"

"No," Raoul called. "No one is counting the minutes here. Just stay the course." Our faces almost touched as we breathed, mingling our own air with the cool night mist, so that when he finally did kiss me it was as easy as breathing. Light at first his lips brushed me, and he tasted good, salty and a little sweet from the brandy. Tenderly he ran his lips over mine, tasting me with gentle pressure. He took my face in his hands and said my name, over and over, until I reached up and covered his mouth with mine. I had had a man inside my body, had shaken with desire that threatened to break me into pieces, but nothing was like this first kiss, this stroking of mouths with soft lips.

Then two shy tongues touched and then withdrew, a little unsure. This first kiss contained all of him, all of Raoul I had known through time. Soft on my mouth was the wet boy on the seaside dragging a limp piece of red silk. Sliding across my lips flew the friend who jumped from boulder to boulder on the Cote-du-Nord shore and chased crabs which we roasted on sticks over the fire. He broke their red shells and gave me the sweet meat inside. There was the man who sat in my garden choked with shyness and then kissed my hands so sweetly, and all of that man summed himself up in the shy moist movements of his mouth over mine.

The kiss is the man, I thought. His lips felt thin at first, but that was because he was reserved, and as I pulled gently on his lips with mine, they softened and swelled, opened and relaxed, until he drew me deeply inside his mouth. I was glad that in the midst of all my ruin, of all my shame, at least I could give him this mouth of mine for his own.

When we broke apart the street swam before my eyes. I hadn't noticed that we had moved, yet there was my building hovering over me grey and gaunt. He reached stiffly, awkwardly for the door but I said, no, no, don't escort me inside. He protested, he could not treat me so disrespectfully, but I begged and pleaded, don't.

He kissed me quickly but deeply once again, and then with a sigh let the coachman help me out. I walked backwards from his carriage, still feeling him on my mouth, hating to sever our gaze, and through the window his lips moved silently, "Tomorrow … tomorrow."

(_continued_…)


	20. Like Sins

**Like Sins**

**A/N: ** _Thanks, Jennie, for some Scandinavian "touches," and to GlovedHand for some interesting discussion on Erik and the Persian. _

Martine and I have gone to Grobbendonk to help Anki pack. The trip to England comes very soon, and twice already in the course of our visit Anki has burst into tears over all that must be done. Martine's slender arms can do the work of three women but she complains and criticizes. Anki is sensitive about her housekeeping, too. She has a Flemish girl who does the scrubbing, but if the servant plays with the children or lets them help, Anki does not chastise her, and the floor does not shine. In Martine's house, every floor sparkles whether it wants to or not, and no child dares leave so much as a toe print on it.

Jannecke drove Martine with Lilli and Mathilde to Grobbendenk by motor-car. Tired and grey, he smiled weakly at Anki and me as he prepared to leave, deaf to Anki's pleas to stay for supper. "Give her something to do," he joked. "She has too much energy."

"That's the trouble with these new carriages," Anki grumbled as we made our way into the kitchen, where Martine scrubbed her girls' faces and griped about the dirt, dodging a cabbage leaf that threatened to stick to her skirt. Anki hastily retrieved it and threw it into the scrap-can, and went on, "People had to rest their horses, feed them, water them. They just couldn't turn around and leave. Now it's rush here, rush there, as if there's no room for rest."

"He wants to get back," Martine inserted, still scrubbing. "He has a lot of work to do for the Ministry. Important work that can't wait."

"Of course," Anki replied, but her glance said, _He probably wants a little peace and quiet for a change_.

"I'm surprised to hear you complain about motor-cars," I said. "Usually it's the people older than me who don't like them."

"They change everything with their noise and bustle," Anki said. She handed the children each a stick of barley sugar, but Martine intercepted them.

"They can't have those," Martine announced. "It will spoil their supper."

Eight pairs of eyes appealed to her, but Martine believed in justice, not mercy, and so the children were sent right back outside to play with their cousins in the hayloft, where they proceeded to cover themselves from head to toe in sweet-smelling dust and straw. "Are you sure it's safe out there?" Martine asked, but Anki just waved at her and went on preparing tea.

She served her tea without cakes, and when Martine remarked that it would be nice to have a slice of toast to dip in it, Anki with uncharacteristic snappishness said, "Are you sure it won't spoil your appetite?" Because Anki had a trace of smile on her plump face, Martine only smiled back, but the two women's backs were up now. It would be a long visit, I feared.

While Anki and the cook worked on supper, I elbowed Martine into the parlor and whispered, "Can you two please get along, for the little ones' sake if no one else's?"

"Not if it means having my children interfered with. Just because your daughter-in-law runs a sloppy household, children running all over getting dirty and traipsing it all inside, servants that don't know their place, living like peasant farmers instead of a respected physician and his wife … I won't raise my own that way, even if you, Mother, encourage it at every step. And now, this going off to England, as if they should be pulled out of school, dragged to another country to live among people with foreign ways…"

"Why did you come then?" I said, my back going up as well. "If you find nothing here to your liking."

"To help you, Mother," she said in an arch tone. "Because it was my Christian duty."

"Not even so the children could play together?" I asked, interested now. Martine had never spoken of Johannes's and Lilli's strange pre-adolescent love. Perhaps she didn't know about it, and far be it from me to tell her.

"Play," she huffed. "My children came here to work, not to fritter their time away in the barn."

I sighed, but before I could think of anything to say, a great noise erupted in the pantry room off the kitchen, whoops and calls, laughter and delighted squeals. Baby Roland toddled in first, covered with dust and calling out, "Kitties! Kitties!" "We wouldn't let him have one, Mama, don't worry!" "No, we didn't bring them in the house, Aunt Martine." "Genna squirted a little milk out of the cow, for the cat, so she would let us see her babies…"

"Good heavens," said Anki. "That cow can kick. Was Karl there, to do the milking?"

"Karl let me, Mama," Genna said. "The cow didn't kick me. She knows me now that you showed me how to milk her. I let Karl help, so he could finish his other chores faster."

"I'm sure you did," Anki laughed. "And it's good you didn't bring the kitties in."

"Papa told us not to," Johannes said seriously above all the clamor. "He said that if the mother gets too angry because they're gone, she won't take care of them properly. But she did let us look at them. And she caught a rabbit, too. It was still twitching."

Martine grimaced. "Is that suitable talk, Johannes?"

"Oh, Aunt Martine, you're right. I shouldn't call it 'twitching.' Papa told me what it was called. He says it's very important to use the right words when you describe something … what are they? Galvan… Galvana … Galvanic response! That's it! When they twitch like that after they're dead, it's called a 'galvanic response.'"

"Very good!" Anki beamed, ignoring Martine's glare. Then Philippe came in, wiping his hands and face on one of the children's wet towels, as six little forms attached themselves to his legs and back. He picked up Lilli and Mathilde, one in each arm, and gave them each a wet kiss. When Larissa complained, he smiled at her and said, "Guests first, always," and then she and Genna went aloft into his embrace. Johannes then stuck out his hand, frowning a little. He was too big to be picked up and hugged, and so the two shook hands, and I saw Philippe's shoulders shake from suppressed laughter.

Then the late-afternoon sun broke in through the kitchen window, and a rose-red haze surrounded Philippe as he hoisted Baby Roland up in his arms. The little boy's skirt rose to show his fat legs and the clumsy hem stitches, sewn by six-year old Genna. She'd shortened his shift so that he wouldn't trip on it. Roland stopped squealing and the two of them, father and child, hung there quietly in the evening air for just a second, looking into each other's faces. The stillness that surrounded Philippe reminded me in an instant of Erik when he would turn his attention towards something, focusing on it with utter intentness. _I wish you could see them_, I told him in my heart. But perhaps he already did.

Ten fit easily around the big oak-plank table in the dining room, which was set for eleven. The empty place was for Raoul, for the remainder of their mourning. Larissa had laid a flower on his plate, a poppy that glowed like a gem. Red cabbages must have been plentiful in the garden, because they were well-represented at the table, cooked up with potatoes and strips of pork. Poor Martine, I thought, watching her fix her eagle eye on the children all through supper. In her house, the children got bread and milk in the kitchen, and then it was off to bed with them.

"And Mrs. Vermoen must have had her baby quickly, eh?" Anki said as Philippe ladled out cabbage and pork. "I didn't expect to see you until late tonight."

"A fine boy," he answered. "Mostly I read the newspapers on the back porch with her husband. He needed me more than she did." Then he looked hard at Martine, waiting for her to say something about unfitting subjects at the supper table. She sat very straight and looked stiffly ahead, ignoring him. But the children ate quickly and asked no questions, and were soon excused to the nursery.

When Anki suggested coffee in the parlor, Martine's contorting mouth could no longer stay silent. "But when are we going to start the packing?" she said, and Philippe and Anki simply stared at her.

"Sister," Philippe said gently, "we haven't seen you for months. We like a little coffee, maybe some brandy and a bit of music to settle our stomachs. When the sun's up, there's more than enough time to work. I wasn't even expecting to spend this evening here at home, but here we are, and I wish to savor it."

My eyes grew wet as he said it. The way he held his head, the way his long face white against its black hair pulled downwards to earth, how his hands drummed unconsciously against the table, the timbre of his voice itself all called to mind Erik, yet when he spoke, the tones he used were Raoul's, calming, tender, concerned.

Philippe poured himself a snifter and played his cello, one Mozart selection after another, some I could recall and some I couldn't. Wrapped in his playing, he seemed oblivious to us. Anki and I darned socks in the lamplight, for no wires ran close enough to the farmhouse to supply it with electricity. Martine embroidered white silk thread on the spotless linen of an altar cloth and said nothing.

"I pray no one comes to call for him this evening," Anki said. "It's so hard for him to write his papers and go to sick people in the middle of the night as well. He says he needs to sleep only a few hours each night, but I still worry that he'll spread himself too thin."

"In England he won't see patients, will he?"

"No, Mother de Chagny, he won't. He says he will miss it, that no doctor in research should lose sight of the men and women behind the numbers on the paper. I said, 'I'll be glad to have you home at nights, then,' and he laughed, saying that the laboratory sometimes demanded more from a physician in the bleak hours than the sick. I'm glad you will come to London for a few weeks while we settle in."

"I'm not going to Perros until early October," I said.

"I don't understand why you're going to that cold, boring place anyway, Mother," Martine inserted.

"It's where your grandfather was buried, for one thing."

Philippe stopped playing. "I remember when you and Father took us all there for a holiday. Louvel was about eight, and I recall he kept asking Father, 'Tell us about the cave. Let's find the cave that you and Mother used to explore. Maybe there's pirate treasure in it.'"

"You must have been about fourteen," I said. "All we heard from Louvel that summer was, 'Philippe won't play with me, Philippe keeps leaving me behind.'"

"You wouldn't play with me, either," Martine said. "I think you spent the entire summer alone. As did I, and Louvel."

"It's true," Philippe answered. "It was an odd holiday, for we all were alone in our own little preoccupations. We climbed on the same rocks, went on the same jetties, but all at different times, as if we hated each other that summer."

"It was just your ages," I remarked. "A boy caught between being a child and a man is neither, and needs time to discover who he is."

"You could have made him play with us," Martine said.

Philippe and I laughed, of one mind. "I don't think so," I remarked. "Philippe can be very stubborn."

"Yes, he can," Anki quipped. "I can tell you stories."

"Not necessary," Philippe said, and held out his hand to her. "I'm ready to retire."

"In a moment," Anki said, smiling. "Did Louvel ever find the cave?"

"No," Philippe sighed. "They'd built a resort hotel on that strip of beach, and everything was gone. He came to my bed in the room we shared that night and told me about it, sobbing. He was disconsolate for days, even though I told him that they probably didn't find any treasure. 'There will be no more treasure for me when I grow up and can go search for it,' he cried."

"Poor Louvel," I said. "I never knew."

"Mothers often don't," Philippe remarked, still holding Anki's hand, and her eyes shone bright in the lamplight. "Has he written you recently?"

"He has, but I didn't bring it. He's happy, Philippe. He thinks in a few years he will captain his own boat. He hasn't gone searching for treasure, instead he ferries other people's in the form of wheat and corn down to the port of New Orleans, but he's happy. Marta spoke only German when he first met her, and now they chatter in German, French, and English, as the mood takes them. He loves the river, he says it's far wider and deeper than anything in Europe, even the Rhine, and I can testify to that, when your father and I rode over the great iron bridge that linked it from east to west."

Then I told Philippe the other part of Louvel's letter, when he begged me once more to sell the house, to leave Brussels and come to St. Louis, and Philippe's face grew even longer. " 'There is going to be a war, Mother,' he wrote. "The Prussians and the French have hated each other since the 1870s, and Belgium is like a nut within the jaws of the nutcracker.' " I remembered Erik's long speech about a tide of blood washing up under _L'Arc de Triomphe_, and I wondered.

"A friend is coming to Brussels shortly for some kind of diplomatic meeting to talk about Belgium's neutrality," and as I mentioned Monsieur Peillard's upcoming trip, my heart quickened. In my bag was a letter from him, unread, waiting for a moment alone when it could be savored. At home on the bureau was a small stack, slowly growing.

"A friend?" Philippe asked.

"Someone I've had a few letters with, back and forth. An attorney, who writes magazine articles in his spare time."

"An attorney?" Philippe asked.

"Umm," Anki said, pulling on Philippe's hand. "Of course Mother de Chagny has friends, even gentleman ones," and she gave me a little wink.

"Since he writes on political matters, I would like to ask him his opinion when I write again," I said. "I'll tell him what Louvel says, see what he thinks. The more opinions the better with something that serious, I should say."

"Philippe" Anki said, "We should say good-night now." She kissed me on both cheeks, and I tried not to show too much pleasure, for fear of making Martine jealous. I can't help how I feel, if I'm more partial to Anki than Martine, who is my own flesh and blood. I looked at my thin, pale daughter, her hair already faded more than mine as she stabbed her embroidery with resolute stitches that never drew a drop of blood to mar the pure white cloth, and sighed.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Sometimes birds would get into the auditorium of the Opera Garnier and fly up into the rafters. You could hear them flapping, twittering, and either they died, or got out somehow. That was how Raoul and I finished up our explorations of the vast wooden fly-tower above the main stage, like birds lost in the wooden forest of the flies.

Until we came to the final fateful day.

It was Thursday, and the next night I was to sing Marguerite in _Faust_. I was to meet Raoul at tea, and I lay in bed a few moments longer to savor the sweetness that still lingered from some already-forgotten dream. A grating, sliding noise startled me, and in my nightgown I ran into the parlor. The rug had been rolled to one side, and there was Margot, dragging a trunk over the bare wooden floor, and Adèle huffing behind her, weighed down with boxes.

"What on earth are you doing?" I demanded of Margot.

"Didn't he tell you, Madame? We're packing."

I rubbed sleep from my eyes. "And going where?"

"He didn't say, just told me that I was to pack us all up and be ready to clear out of here in a few days. Sounded to me like you and he was going abroad for a time."

A stone-faced Adèle handed me a note, sprawling round handwriting on thick cream paper. "A boy brought it round this morning, Mam'selle," she said to me, glaring at Margot.

Stunned, I read it quickly. I was to come to Erik this afternoon after lunch. "And Mama?" I asked.

"Monday I'm to move with her to a room on, where is it? Don't have the slip it's written on. This one's been sulking about it all morning," and she shook her head at the scowling Adèle.

"I deserve more notice, Mam'selle," Adèle said stubbornly.

"She's Madame to you," said Margot.

Adèle threw her boxes to the floor with a thud. "I won't take orders from you no more! You keep insulting her like that, I don't know why she don't smack you. She's not married, and she's a good girl, stop calling her 'Madame' like she runs some red-light house or something. I won't stand for it!" and the weeping girl ran out of the apartment with the slam of a door.

The apartment walls seemed to close in on me, and it was almost with relief that I finally left. In a beaded reticule tied to my waistband I carried the iron satyr-headed key. In my heart I bore a lump of ice.

When I arrived, he was packing note books, sheet music, and folios into boxes, and he scarcely looked up when I entered through the wide open stone door. His workroom door also stood wide open. I stood in the entrance, expectantly. Finally he came over to take my coat, not forgetting to make that little ritualistic gesture of brushing his face through the fur. Drawn in morbid fascination I looked into his work room, now empty save for tools and a few remaining rolls of silver wire, and the long strips of rubber he cut into the shapes of human faces, so eerie with their dead eyes and smooth features. On a wig stand rested a mask, and I gave a cry, for it looked like a blank and brainless male human face, with a black moustache and long thick side whiskers.

"Where are they? Where's everything gone?" I stammered.

"Don't you remember? I made a shipment. They took it all, and paid me well for it, too. There's no point in starting all over again here."

"You told Margot to pack," I said. "Where am I going?"

"Can you not simply trust me?" he rounded on me. "Marguerite will ascend to her heavens, and so will you ascend to yours shortly afterwards."

There seemed to be nothing to say to this, so I wandered over to his shelves of books, where some had already been emptied. Then I spotted it on the mantelpiece, large, ebony, with inlaid carvings of lighter wood. A box, strong and square. I tried to lift the lid but it wouldn't budge. Apparently it was locked. Trying to pick it up to rattle it did no good either, because it was firmly fixed to the mantel with some kind of bolt or screw.

"Ah, you've noticed," he said, watching me intently. "The box of life and death. The box of secrets." He took a little key from his vest pocket and dangled it in front of me, the way I used to swing a bit of yarn in front of my kittens. "Aren't you curious? Wouldn't you like to see inside of it? No matter, I won't show you. Perhaps you will never have to see inside it." Then sighing as if the whole weight of the Opera itself rested on his back, he continued his packing and ignored me.

I went back into his workroom. The forms of Poligny, the faceless Persian girl, the headless torso on the work table, all were gone. That same sharp peculiar smell was in the air, so tantalizingly familiar, yet I couldn't place it. Closing my eyes I breathed in heavily, tasting the air on my tongue, and then it came to me. On an autumn day crinkly-crisp with pine needles underfoot, the nobleman rode haughtily astride his horse. His footmen shushed me when I tried to run up to Papa and climb into his arms. But Papa couldn't hold me, for his hands were busy as he carried the long gun. The men had gone out to shoot elk and had come back with a young doe. When I pushed past one of the men and grabbed Papa's leg, he put his hand on my hair and that same smell came to me, of black powder. Gunpowder. Erik's work room smelt of gunpowder.

A door was open at the back of the workroom, one I'd never seen ajar before. Looking anxiously behind to see if he noticed, I crept through it. It wound around behind my bedroom, it seemed, and came to another door without handle or apparent hinges, shut tight. I pushed and prodded on it, but like that strange extra door in my bedroom, it would not budge. But the smell was stronger here, stronger by far, and on my fingers were a few faint smudges of some sharp chemical, like the gunpowder but not quite the same.

Not wanting to wipe my hands on my skirt, I hurried back, only to find him staring at me from the bench where he sat.

"Did you find what you were looking for? Perhaps the secret passage into the enchanted forest?"

"Erik," I asked, heart pounding, "Why did you ask me here?"

"Isn't it enough to know that your loving husband wanted to see you, especially when he has completed all that he labored on for so many years?"

"You finished the opera, then. Really finished it."

"Yes, and both the funeral and the nuptial Mass setting. Life and death, bookends on either side of the shelf, with passion in between." He glared at me when he said this, pounding his fist on the work table for emphasis.

There was something terribly wrong here, and I didn't know what. "Perhaps you might show them to me."

"I hardly think you want to hear either one. No one wants to contemplate his own death, and you do not love me, so why would you even want to hear the wedding Mass?"

The gaslights had been turned down very low, and the work room was chilly. I wanted to spin about on my heel at that very moment and leave, but the weight of his sarcasm pressed me down. "I want to hear your funeral Mass," I finally said.

He laughed low and slowly. "It will be yours, too."

I turned on him. "You know I hate that. Stop saying that." When he continued to chuckle, not looking at me, I wandered to the door of his bedroom, then cried out in surprise. Up until then it had not seemed real, that Erik could actually vacate these apartments under the Opera. So long had I come to associate Erik with an underground life that even when I went to market with him in the dimness of dawn, he still seemed subterranean. Yet the long Japan-style scroll with the words of the "Dies Irae" had been pulled down, as had the black hanging crepe. They sat crumpled in a corner, and the bare stone walls gleamed shiny in the white gaslight.

A faint brush of wind and the cloth of his coat touched my arm, making me jump. He passed by me and wiped his finger over the organ's keyboard, showing me the faint grey trail of dust. "You see, I have not played since you last left. Nothing has come forth. It's as if there's nothing left for me. I sit in front of the keyboard and I am blank, like a freshly washed window."

"Perhaps another instrument," I suggested. "You might pick up the violin."

"I might. Or I might simply take it into the coffin with me. I am sure there will be enough room between the two of us for it. So romantic, wouldn't you say, for the father and daughter both to be buried each with violins?"

Against my will I looked over at his coffin-bed. The red laminar veil had been taken down and the bedclothes removed. Books, crumpled papers, some music folios, even a few popular magazines were piled in the center. "I think you should play your violin now," I remarked. "It will perhaps take you out of your black mood."

Instead of saying anything, he started to sort through sheet music and tossed most of it into the pile on the bed. I left him and went into my room, and noticed at once that the bed had been rumpled, the pillows slightly skewed, the coverlet pulled up half-heartedly. As I straightened it I picked up a pillow and over me washed his scent, musky and thick. He was sleeping in here, I thought sadly, and as if in perfect timing with my mood, the soft strains of the violin came from the drawing room. It was another composition of my father's, one that I'd sung for Erik during the first month of our angelic coupling, when he was only a voice behind the mirror, when I envisioned him tall and white, with wings that spread out in bright gold and silver and snow-colored feathers.

I hugged the pillow to my breast and breathed in deeply. Then I knew, this was where he slept, not in that mockery of a sarcophagus. In the past, before I came, he must have changed the sheets so that none of his scent was on them. But he must have wanted to see me on some impulse, and left the old ones on the bed, and there he was, silhouetted in smell. The rich masculine odor rose up to embrace me as the pillow molded itself around my breast.

The sweet haunting melody wrapped itself around me too, and behind my eyes I saw the wide forests of never-cut pine that rose to the clouds. My father wasn't a farmer, really. He had inherited the farm but in his soul he was a wanderer, a tinker, one of those violin-players we would always see at Midsummer, the old men who would appear in town and wink at the girls, or play some roguish melody for the children, whom some feared because you never knew if one of these odd grizzled players would be the Bad Man in disguise. In that melody, Erik had captured the soul of my father and reflected him back to me. A harsh wave of homesickness overcame me – not so much for Father himself, but for the deep pines that had taken root in his soul and never left it.

Sitting on the bed while Erik played, pressing my face into the pillow, I thought back to those first few weeks when I believed without reservation, when I really thought that a piece of heaven had opened itself in my little room, and how little of that time we spent together was actually devoted to music. Yes, Erik had taught me how to breathe, and his simple exercises for expanding and deepening the chest had thrust me from the margins onto the center stage. But when I wasn't breathing for him, when I wasn't ululating in those long passages that I now recognized to be the lead soprano parts of his Don Juan opera, we talked.

We talked about my father. I told him everything I could remember, hour after hour, week after week. As I talked the ice in my heart melted, the cold armor I'd built up over the years softened and washed away. It wasn't simply missing my father, it was the loss of everything, the house with its big wide red barn, the gentle cow, the well where Mother always used to give me the first drink from the bucket when she drew it up. It was the loss of Father as I remembered him before Mother sickened and died. And one day, hesitantly, full of fear and trepidation, I asked my angel, "Do you ever see him? Please tell me he's there with you, not in that other place. Tell me how he is."

And he had told me then, from the other side of that mirror. I hugged and stroked the pillow, breathing in Erik, breathing out sorrow, and my tears soaked the feathery softness that should have been his wings but were only goose down feathers slipping around inside the smooth fabric of the casing. The houses in heaven were built of cloud, and each person had one, Erik had said. My father's house was a little one built of the kind of summer evening when the sun sets in red and violet bands broad against the sky, and the roof and lintels were decorated with streaks of gold, the color that the sun leaves right before it sinks entirely behind the horizon.

_Does he speak of me_? I demanded. _Does he miss me_?

_He misses you_, Erik lied, for truth mixed with lies is still a lie, _but there is no sorrow in heaven, and I tell him every moment of our lessons, of our talks. And he plays the nyckelharp, yes, there are nyckelharps in heaven, not just trumpets and ordinary harps and fiddles, and he has one, and he thinks of you every day, and he is happy._

He told me, too, how each heavenly inhabitant had with them a perfect little white stone that God Himself had given them when they first came before him, and in the pockets of their robe they always keep it, because on that little white stone is their secret name, their true name, the one no one else knows except themselves and God.

_Does every angel have one too_? I wanted to know.

_Indeed_, he answered.

_Tell me yours_, I demanded. _Tell me your true angelic name_.

_I can't_, he said. _If I did, I would be banished from heaven for good, never to return. I would have to live the rest of my life on earth as a man._

_Tell me_, I said. _Then I could see you_. But he said nothing.

Lying on the bed in the arms of Erik's pillows, I knew something. It was from that week on that my angelic "voice" became so much more human – making demands on me, insisting I never go to parties or supper with men, threatening to return to heaven permanently if I disobeyed. I hit the pillow a little, weeping openly now, arguing with myself. He lied to you shamelessly, deceitfully, and yet so much of what he said was true. If there was a heaven, then Father certainly was in it. That he would think of me with love even from the other shore was no surprise to me, as I had heard since childhood of the "cloud of witnesses" that surround us everywhere we go. It was true that when I left my meetings with that unseen angelic voice I walked home as if on clouds myself, for sheer happiness. A happiness based on lies.

Erik stood in the doorway and made a gentle cough. Swift and fluid, he moved to the foot of the bed, and said softly, "I have never seen you weep like this." Then he buried his face in the coverlet, clutching it convulsively back and forth until I feared it would tear. It was true, I had cried before him in anger, in ferocity, in desperation, but never this self-abandoned weeping.

Starting to weep himself, he said over and over, don't leave me, please don't leave me. Then something cold inside me curled up. When I was little I used to touch the snails with a pine needle, not so hard as to hurt them, but just to watch them shrink inside their shells and pull the tough foot over the opening. That was how my heart curled up inside me, and so I said nothing as he continued to cry himself, not looking at me.

"Stay with me tonight," he said, muffled in the coverlet. "Sleep with me in this bed."

Then all my meditations on lies flew out the door, and before I thought more about it, I heard myself say, "I can't. I'm in the way of women, and I want to go back home. To the apartment, I mean. I have to rest before tomorrow night if I'm not going to be too fatigued to sing." Then terror seized me at the enormity of the lie, because all he had to do was flip me over and examine between my legs to know that nothing could be further from the truth.

He shuddered a little. "Your courses came," he said in a dead voice. "So even that is to be denied me." Then he breathed out softly, "Of course. Go back now."

Wiping my eyes, I said, "But I haven't heard your compositions. Isn't that what you called me here for?"

He pulled himself up and wrapped his arms around himself all the way, rocking a little. "I have work to do here, as you can see. The fabrication room must be packed, as I'm not building any more automata here. There are still piles of sheet music to go through." His hands traced around the embroidered flowers on the coverlet, always restless. "I told that miserable Persian he could have the furniture, if he could manage to get it out of here. To lift some of it would probably kill that scrawny servant of his."

"What?" I said. "Aren't we going to need it? I thought you liked it, that it was from your family."

"We won't need it," he said in a strange voice. "We'll have furniture far better, or at least you will."

So many knots of feeling, so few ways to untie them. "Margot said that you and I were going abroad. Please, Erik, I want to know where."

"Farther than you can imagine," and he closed his eyes, still clutching the coverlet.

Then I knew he wasn't going to tell me anything. Once he got me into a coach (for I could not imagine him risking a scene in a railway station or on board a train), he could take me anywhere, and I would never know. He could slip a handkerchief over my face, and carry me in a daze on board some ship, perhaps even take me to Algeria or Morocco, where I would disappear behind the walls of some sun-baked fortress. Then the urge to flee overcame me again, with the overwhelming sensation of being trapped with Erik forever in some subterranean, voluptuous, walled-in dream. Trembling, I said, "Erik, I'll go now. I will see you after _Faust_ tomorrow, you know that."

"Of course you will see Erik tomorrow," he said. "There was never any doubt of that. In this last twenty-four hours, can you still keep to your promise?" Up from the bed he rose, cold-eyed and composed, as if he had not stopped to weep at all.

I thought I saw two vague black shadows walking back and forth on the other side of the lake as I headed back to the Rue Scribe gate, but they vanished when I stopped for a closer look.

Instead of going home, I headed straight for my dressing room. It had been a long walk up through the Rue Scribe gate, then around the Opera and into a side entrance, where I slipped through the corridors like a ghost, into my dressing room, and I was tired. Raoul was there, pacing, face pale and distraught. Immediately he fell on me, "Where were you? It's been hours, I didn't know where to find you. I was about to go to your apartment. I went to the rehearsal hall, they hadn't seen you this afternoon, they were most rude, making jokes about how Mademoiselle Daaé had no need of rehearsals anymore, she just communed with the composers with her fairy magic and knew how to sing it all perfectly. Look, I took the liberty of having tea sent up, but it's all cold now, and ..."

I sank onto the sofa. "I forgot entirely. No, don't be angry, I didn't forget our meeting, just the rehearsal."

"Christine," he said. "Your eyes, they're balls of flame in your face. What happened? Why have you been crying?"

"I'm sorry I was late, I was ... delayed. I couldn't help it," and I started to cry a little from the sheer vexation of all of it, of my lies to Erik, my courses that hadn't come, and for all the lies I was to tell Raoul, sweet Raoul who could not help now but believe me.

"It's him, isn't it? It's always him, he makes you miserable, why can't you leave him?"

"Where would I go? Wherever I would go, he would follow me. You can't know, Raoul, you have no idea how clever he is, how much he knows, and how well he knows me."

Raoul clenched his hands into fists, and his face was cold. "If I don't know, it's because you will not tell me." Then, as if he pulled some string inside to bring himself back to himself, he said, "You're shaking. When was the last time you ate?"

I shook my head. "I don't remember."

"Then look, have some tea, even if it's only warm. There, put some sugar in it. Have you tried it English style, with a little cream? No, not cream and lemon together, that will curdle. I tried that once, and my sisters laughed at the face I made."

After we had eaten, he pulled an envelope from his waistcoat and laid it in front of me. "Open it," he said, and my eyes swam at the well-crafted hand, the short, crisp words. "It's not dated," he said as he watched my face while I read. "That can be added anytime. But unless you tell me what troubles you, who this man is who makes you weep, what you plan to do, I will not get on board that ship. We have vacillated, we have played back and forth, but the time for play is over. I will resign, Christine, and I will devote my time to freeing you from him, even if that means I have to challenge him in combat. If you tell me that you are marrying Erik and that I have no cause to worry for your future, then next week I will salute my captain and ask permission to come aboard, and you will never see me again. Not that I will not love you, on the contrary. But I will not live half in the shadows, never knowing what is going to spring out at me."

I set the letter down and he placed it in my lap. "It's entirely in your hands. I go, or I resign, and stay with you, and fight this Erik if I must."

"Stop!" I cried out, putting my hand over his mouth. "Please do not say his name. Please, I can't bear it. He will hear you, and his promise to stay out of my dressing room he will break, I know it. Please don't speak it here."

He took my hand as if it were fine crystal, and set it aside as he went on, "Or you tell me who he is, what he wants with you, and if it is honorable I will leave you, and trouble you no more. That is, if I mean nothing to you at all."

"That's not true. You know it isn't."

"Then tell me. Tell me the secret of this man, this 'voice.' I promise you, Christine, if you want me to, I will take you someplace safe, someplace where he won't be able to find you. No," and he waved his hand at me, full of energy and purpose now, "no more talk of how you've promised not to marry. You know what I think of that promise, but since it was yours to make, it is yours to set aside if your conscience allows. What is important is that you be safe. I have a place in mind. It's ..."

"No!" I said. "Don't say it here. But tell me, this place is safe? Really safe? Erik could not find me there?"

"He would not even think to look for you there. You could stay until you made up your mind, until you decided whether this promise you have made to him is worth keeping or not." He saw me hesitate, and took my hands in his. "Not as my mistress," he said. "Never that way. Please, let me tell you my thoughts. If not here, then where can we talk?"

"I know," I answered, and so we went once more up into the great fly-tower above the stage, and I held his hand as we went, trembling with fear but exhilarated too. "Up we go. He won't come up here. He's told me so. There's a staircase, that spiral iron one over there. It's where the workmen go to get to the roof."

"How do you know he won't come up here?" Raoul asked. "Why shouldn't he, if this building is his from top to the farthest cellar, as you say?"

"He just won't," I repeated stubbornly, more to convince myself than Raoul.

We went out onto the broad metal walkways, and our feet made faint metallic echoes as we walked to the edge. "It's a river valley," Raoul commented as we looked over the Seine that glowed purple and red in the setting sun. "All of Paris is in a valley, cut through by the river. It must have been far wider in earlier times."

The first few twinkling lights came on in the city's broad expanse of grey and brown and marble. "So many trees," I remarked.

"Are you cold?" he asked. "We've left our coats. But never mind," and he put his arms around me, pulling me to him in the ghostly twilight, so that I could warm myself against the wool of his jacket and the comfortable front of his body. It was very still, as twilight often is. I listened for more metal footfalls like ours, but heard nothing.

"We're safe up here," I said. "Tell me, tell me where you could take me."

"You're right, I shouldn't tell you directly. What if he tried to force it out of you? I'll say only this, down on the Dordogne river, atop the limestone bluffs, there is a convent. My sister Martynière stayed there for a time. The sisters are kind, and the village nearby is very small, so any strangers or unusual behavior would be noticed at once. The convent has a cloister deep within the walls. It's a fortress, Christine, built almost a thousand years ago, and inside there is a honeycomb of a thousand cells and rooms. No so-called ghost can pass through those thick walls. You could stay there as long as you liked. I could not visit you, of course, but we could write, and you could rest and meditate on what to do."

"Could this be?" I asked. "You would really do this?"

"Yes," he said, pulling me closer. "If you want me to, I will."

"It doesn't seem possible."

"It is. It can start tonight, even. You can leave with me right now. I will have to find a hotel for you, as the carriage must be arranged. We will stop for nothing, we won't even go back to your dressing room for our coats."

"No," I said, "I have to think. My mind is in a turmoil. I don't know what to say, or what to do. I do want to leave him, Raoul. But I owe him so much, and he has waited to hear me sing Marguerite for so long."

"That's the first time I've heard you say it. Say it again, Christine, and mean it. You want to leave Erik. Say it, and believe it."

"Oh, God," I said. "Please don't say his name."

"Why? What is so special about it? What is so special about him?"

I swallowed hard, drew up every resolve of strength from within, and so I told him. Not the truth, not all of it, but most, from the time I first heard a strange ethereal singing in my new dressing room. Raoul cried out, he almost wept at one point or two, but mostly he grew red with rage and redder at the strain of suppressing it. I told him how I had first heard a silver voice from heaven through the walls of my room, how I had run into the corridor to see if some singer unknown to me practiced in the hallway. I told him how credulous I was, how Mama Valerius was worse, when she told me to ask the angel if he indeed was one, thus giving Erik a direct entry into the deception.

I recounted how on the night of the falling chandelier Erik had taken me drugged and compliant down to his apartments by the lake, then imprisoned me. Raoul winced as I recalled the beauty and terror of Erik's and my reenactment of the Otello scene, and wrung his hands with frustration as I described how Erik had buffeted me about afterwards. He gnashed his teeth as I told him how pity brought me back to Erik at the end of those two weeks.

But I lied, too, how shamelessly I lied, things done and left undone. I told him I feared and loathed Erik's face, and that was the reason I wanted to escape. Tears sprang to my eyes and Raoul thought they were tears of revulsion, of terror at Erik's ravaged features, but they were tears of shame, the shame of the falsehoods that poured from my mouth as the Seine poured through the heart of Paris.

And of the ring, of its giving, and all that followed in the hollow of the night from my acceptance of that ring, I said nothing. "He is a monster," I said at one point. "A monster made of death from head to toe."

Then I went too far, because Raoul pulled away from me a little and said soberly, "Remember, Christine, I saw his unmasked face before you did, even, when you still thought he was some kind of spirit. He frightened me in the dark and cold of that Perros church, where the superstitious expect to see supernatural beings. But I thought about it all the way back to Paris on the train, that he was in no way supernatural, but simply a man of great ugliness and greater cunning. I am not a man of the world as my brother is, but I do know enough of women to know that ugliness in a man is no impediment to a woman's love. Then I saw him again on the grand stairs of the Garnier Opera in the full light, and while it was clear his face was grotesquely painted, it was in no way monstrous. What is monstrous, Christine, has been his treatment of you, and if I call him monster it is not for the unfortunate accident that marred his birth, but the deception and violence he has used against you in the name of love."

We had walked around the whole perimeter of the roof and came to rest at the foot of Apollo's great bronze statue, sheltering from the wind that slowly rose up from the deepening star-filled sky.

"But I don't understand one part," Raoul went on. "You say he kept you for two weeks, and then let you go. Why did you return to him? It makes no sense the way you told it. Here is a man who had taken you against your will, lied to you, beaten you, and I will kill him if I ever see him, Christine, for that beating, and yet when you are free you return to him."

I sat a long time, wanting to pull his arms around me, but something cold in him kept me apart. "He loved me," I said finally. "He still does. It is a love that will never rest."

"Is it a love you share? Because it sounds as if you do. This is not the first time I've asked, and not the first time you've refused to answer. You say you hate his face. I don't say you lie, because to me your heart is unclear. But I want to know – would you love him were he beautiful? If he had still lied to you, deceived you, threatened you, hurt you? Imagine the handsomest man you can, and then imagine him doing these things, and still being Erik in every regard, in the genius you say he has, the musicianship. Would you be sitting here with me if Erik were beautiful?"

He breathed in great straining gasps, like a train climbing a hill, although he sat at rest. I couldn't look at him, and focused instead on a great red star close to the horizon. It seemed to glare at me from far away, so I couldn't look at it anymore either, and had to face Raoul. A bell rang in my heart, the bell of truth that could not be refused. If Erik were beautiful? I tried to imagine him, tall and slender, with shoulders of iron and his same long graceful limbs, as lovely under the dress black as in it. I saw in my mind his head, large and impressive, with long swept-back hair of deepest black streaked bright with silver. I saw the bones of his face layered over with fine muscle, a warm mobile mouth with lips turned out instead of in, his same sharp brows covered with smooth skin, and a nose strong and fine. Clear skin covered his face, and his eyes looked out from their deep sockets, but ringed with long black lashes instead of pouched black. I imagined what he would look like if he smiled.

Raoul was right. I would not be on this roof, sitting with him. For the Erik of my imagination was the man I thought I would see the night I so foolishly took off the mask. Had that face looked out at me, even though twisted with anger, even had he struck me then and shouted, I would have admitted my wrongdoing, and most likely had crawled before him on my belly, rather than watching him crawl on his.

It was a terrible thing to learn about myself that night, and even more terrible not to acknowledge that I had learned it.

So instead of answering, I told Raoul that he was the one I loved, that he should not violate my conscience by asking me what I kept hidden inside my heart "like sins," as I put it, and then I kissed him. At first he shook a little in surprise, but soon under my mouth he yielded, not getting the answer he wanted, but getting another answer that pleased him in a different way.

"I cannot take you to a convent," he said finally, pulling himself away from a kiss so deep that I had to pull in great mouthfuls of air.

"No," I said. The night grew colder, and we clung tighter together. He took off his coat and wrapped it around me, running his hands up and down everywhere my corset was not, pulling me into his mouth harder now.

When we broke to breathe, before we kissed again he said over and over, "You love me. Please, let it be true. Because I love you more than anything. I can't be without you for a day, even. Please go with me tonight. Please leave Paris with me," but I pleaded with him for one more night, and under my caresses and entreaties he yielded. "Tomorrow, then. It will be tomorrow. We'll go directly by stage, as soon as your performance is over," and he wrapped his coat tighter still, until our breath mingled into white fog and made our faces wet under the wool.

"Mama," I murmured. "You know I can't leave her."

"Christine," he said, surprised. "Whatever made you think we would? When I told you about the convent on the Dordogne, it was of course with both of you in mind. Whether you leave to go into retreat, or leave to become my wife, it is the same."

"But there's Margot," I said. "What if she doesn't let her go?"

"Let her go? Of course she'll let her go. There's my coachman, and I'll have another one of my men with us besides. I'll knock her flat if she tries anything. Look, bring your head down here, right on my chest. Warmer now? You can't be consumed with fear, Christine. It's going to work, you'll see. I still wish you would not wait, that you would simply come with me now and let me send my men to bring Mama Valerius. But I agree that another day will give us more time to prepare. Better?"

Then he held me close and all time stopped. I played with the buttons of his vest and the linen shirt behind them, and inside my hand crept to rest on the warm skin beneath. He opened my jacket and chemise and sought my breast, stroking the skin all around the tip until he found that as well. Our mouths moved together, not kissing all the time, sometimes just resting and breathing as we moved back and forth through hand's-widths' opening of fabric. He drew in his breath with a great shudder, and I didn't have to touch him any lower down to know that he was consumed by desire. He gave a soft little moan and pressed my hand harder against him, and then we both jumped up so hard his coat fell off of us.

A dull metallic "thud" had sounded directly behind us, followed by another, softer one.

"Oh, God," I said in a whisper.

Raoul scrambled to his feet. He looked at me wildly, and we shared the same thought. It would be nothing for Erik to toss us off the roof one after another. Raoul held himself entirely still, listening. He put his finger to his lips, be quiet. Slowly we walked towards the stairs, buttoning shirt and vest and jacket as we went, and it was not until we were on the staircase itself that we began to race, not seeing but feeling the deep black eyes of the night that penetrated our retreating figures.

When we climbed down the stairwell from the fly tower, I pulled on Raoul's sleeve suddenly, begging him to stop. There in the deserted backstage moved a shadow of black, but not Erik. From the black emerged a brown hand with a pale palm, beckoning. Raoul put his arm around me, holding me back.

"It's all right," I whispered. "I know who he is." Taking Raoul's hand, I led him to the beseeching form, and as soon as we were close enough he signaled to us to be silent, then swooped on ahead, his patched black cloak swirling in the dark. We followed him to a panel that he pushed, to find another passage that I had not seen before. We went down and around a dimly lit crawlspace full of cobwebs, only to emerge next to a servant's closet underneath the grand stairway of the foyer.

"I thank you, sir," Raoul said to Erik's Persian friend, giving a slight bow. Raoul looked short and pale next to the tall man whose skin glowed like cream-filled coffee. "Monsieur le Vicomte Raoul de Chagny at your service."

"You may call me 'Daroga,'" the Persian answered, and inclined his head in return. "No one in Paris can remember my name, or pronounce it if they do."

"Daroga is a fine name," I remarked. His beautifully-curved eyes shone green, with little threads of brown and blue throughout.

"It is not a name ... Mademoiselle," he said with a slight hesitation, giving my finger a hard glance. "It is a title. In my home country I was head of security. But that was a long time ago, and a long way off. Now I urge you, leave the Opera, or find some suitable place where you will not be seen."

He turned to go, but Raoul called out, "Wait! I have some questions..." but with a swish of his cape the tall black-clad man was gone.

"Quick, Raoul," I said. "To my dressing room, at once."

He stood square and obstinate. "Who is that man, and how do you know him?"

"Please, not now ... Let's go."

Raoul crossed his arms, jaw set. "I'm going nowhere until you tell me who he is. It's bad enough, to run from the roof where you said we were safe, and then this."

Shocked and irritated at his obstinacy, I turned and walked off, and he followed, red-faced. He didn't speak again until I shut the dressing room door firmly behind us. Swallowing down his frustration, he came to me with arms extended, inviting me in. "Please tell me," he said softly as he rocked me under his chin.

"He is someone who knew ... that man from long ago, in Persia."

"Why is he here? Did he see us on the roof?"

"I don't know. I've seen him around the Opera during intermissions. He wears that odd hat and really stands out."

"Another one who chases the girls of the theater, no doubt."

"No, Raoul, I've never heard of him doing that. One of Sorelli's friends tried to catch his eye, but he wasn't interested. He leaves the girls alone, from what everyone says. Perhaps he has a wife or mistress elsewhere."

"Perhaps," said Raoul, doubt in his voice. "But that's neither here nor there. Christine, please reconsider and leave with me tonight, right this instant."

I pulled away. "You know I can't."

"But why not? What do you owe Erik? Yes, I said his name, and I'm going to from now on – Erik, Erik, Erik, do you hear? Let him come through his mirror or out of the walls if he likes. Is that how you're going to go to him, through the mirror again?" He strode over to it, feeling it all over, smearing it with hand prints. "How does it work? Not by magic, surely, but by some ingenious trickery worthy of Hero of Alexandria. There must be a latch here somewhere, if I could only find it."

"Stop it, Raoul," I cried, pulling on his sleeve. "What if you opened it and it dragged you into the corridor? You would be stuck there, and while I couldn't get to you, he certainly could."

"It's ridiculous," he answered, but he left the mirror alone. "How did he expect you to get to him anyway?"

I patted the reticule tied to my waist sash. "I have a key. To the gate on the other side of the Rue Scribe entrance, the one no one ever goes to."

"In there?" Raoul said in a commanding tone. "A key? Let me see it, if you please."

Reluctantly, slowly I opened the drawstring to my little purse and pulled the iron key out, clutching it tight.

"You should let me have it," he said. "I will talk to the police, they will bring men, and we will go down there and find this Erik."

"Absolutely not," I said, pulling it to my breast and gripping it even tighter.

"So you won't come with me tonight, and you won't let me take the measures necessary to keep not only you safe, but us safe, for good. For it is not just you, Christine. When you pull me into the dressing room, tell me to be quiet, clutch at my sleeve, obviously you think something is going to happen to me as well. Yet that doesn't seem to concern you. It's all Erik's hurt feelings. It's Erik, Erik, nothing but Erik. God help me if I ever hear that name again."

"Then stop saying it," I said.

He turned back to me, imploring. "Please come with me now. Walk with me to the stable, and we can watch them hitch the horses to the carriage. I won't let you out of my sight."

"Raoul, you don't understand."

"Then make me understand. You tell me this story of a man extraordinarily deformed, who repulses you by the merest touch of his finger, who has dominated you as a teacher for three months, so that you could not even greet an old friend when he came to see you. Then he has done worse to you for over a month now, having the audacity to take you from your home. Even after all that, no, I don't understand. You say you love me, but you think you show that love by clinging to another man, even if only for one night?"

It seemed hopeless. "I don't want him to kill himself."

He crossed his arms, astonished. "He's threatened suicide?"

"He has. And he makes threats, vague threats, I don't understand them, but they make me feel terrible, afraid and guilty all at once."

"If he kills himself," Raoul said in a voice hard as ice, "it is good riddance."

I flew towards the door, to grab my coat from the hook. "I won't listen to that. You can't mean that. It's the worst thing a person can do, and you can say that about someone? How cold can you be, Raoul de Chagny?"

"I'm sorry," he said over and over, desperate now. "But it's driving me mad, Christine. You know I am not superstitious. I don't believe in signs or portents. I leave that to the old women who close their eyes and pick out prayers in the breviary, thinking if they say the one their finger lands on, they will get their wish. But I have a sense that we should leave right now, and like Lot's wife fleeing the cities of the plain, we should never look back. Please don't sing tomorrow, Christine. Please, if you love me, and by the love I have for you, I beg you. Please leave with me now."

"I can't," I whispered. "Just as I can't give you my key to the Rue Scribe gate. I do love you. I will go with you tomorrow. But not tonight. To go tonight would be a betrayal."

Then my little room seemed to stretch out like a tunnel with Raoul on the far dim end of it. He was walking forward to hold me, but very slowly, and he seemed to be a little doll, or a man standing on the dock shrinking slowly from view as the boat sails out to sea. He said something but it was lost in the roar of blood which flooded my ears. "Betrayal," I whispered, but it was Erik's voice I heard come out of my mouth. "As long as you wear Erik's ring, you are safe."

The third finger of my left hand was entirely bare.

My knees gave way and I slumped toward the floor, but Raoul caught me in time. Cradling me tenderly, he took me into the boudoir and laid me on the day bed. I pulled him down next to me and we clung together for a few moments before he pulled himself away. I showed him my finger, waving my hand around, mute with terror.

"You took it off," Raoul said. "I am so glad, for you don't know how I hated that thing."

"I didn't take it off," I started to sob. "It's gone, I've lost it. He'll kill me, I know he will, when he finds out."

"Then we won't let him find out. We will leave, and he will never know what happened. It is not your responsibility, Christine. If he chooses to harm himself, it is on his head, not yours."

"You have to leave," I said. "Please go now. I'm safe here, really, I am."

"Let me take you home."

"No, I want to stay here and search, but I need to rest and think first. I'll be all right."

"Then I'll search with you."

I laughed a crazy small laugh, and he looked affronted. "Raoul de Chagny, you are stubborn. It's probably down in the settee cushions, or somewhere around the dressing table. Perhaps it's in my reticule, fallen in there when you made me take out that key. Please, Raoul. If we are to leave tomorrow, you have to plan and pack, and so do I. You need rest as well as me. Really," and I gave one of those false, brave smiles that while they don't fool men, at least reassure them a little.

"Why do you want to find it so badly?"

"I don't know. If I don't go to him tomorrow after _Faust_, that means I will never see him again," and for the first time the enormity hit me, a life entirely without Erik, without even the feel or presence of Erik around and above and, God help me, inside of me. The glimpse I had of him earlier in the day would have been my last. "Perhaps like the magic ring in the fish, it will make its way back to him. But for these last twenty-four hours, let me do this as I see fit, Raoul. Please."

He sighed heavily, but instead of getting up, wrapped me all in his arms as deep as I could go as we lay body to body on the narrow bed. "I don't want to lose you," he said over and over. "I'm so afraid he'll take you from me, that you will go down into that subterranean darkness forever, as you feared. Tell me you won't see him later tonight, oh, please promise that at least."

"I won't," I said. "You can trust me on that. I won't see him again, ever."

He rolled his mouth over mine then, in a long stretch of soft kisses that all blended into one long caress of mouth and tongue. Then I felt him full and erect against my hip, and down his tongue went farther into mine, till tongue wrapped against tongue and he pressed his long full heat harder into the tender flesh at the top of my leg. Slowly he let me go and looked up to the ceiling as if he prayed.

"What?" I said, for he looked like a man tied between opposing horses, almost torn to bits by them.

"I have to leave," he said, "or I will beg you to let me stay, and not just stay, but to lie with you right here, and once I fall into your arms like that, I don't know if I will ever emerge from them."

"Stay," I said. "You've said we'll be married. I trust you," and at that moment I wanted nothing more than to feel him up against me in the night, to fill me with his heat, to not be alone in the dark little room with the thought of Erik moving silently behind the walls.

He pulled himself away, sitting up. "It's not right. You don't have to say that to me."

Confused, I clung to him. "Raoul, I love you. I want you."

Taking my face in his hands, he kissed me softly on the forehead, the kiss a brother would give a sister, or a mother her child. "I love you more than life. But I will not ruin a maiden. I can wait. Tomorrow, then, although I wish you would come with me now. But tomorrow."

After he left, I sat for a long time, staring at the blank finger of my left hand. At first I thought to run after him, calling out, no, you've got it wrong, I'm no maiden and no innocent, and that's why I can suggest such a foul thing. But it didn't seem foul, not at all. I had had my hand on his breast, and knew his skin would be smooth or lightly roughed up with soft hair when my hands glided over him like birds that skim the ocean. A terrible curiosity possessed me, to leave the lights on and see all of him naked and revealed, to run my hands around his thighs to see if they were as round and strong as they appeared. Then I collapsed, face in hands, full of shame and desire all mixed in at once.

Then fear washed away shame and desire both. The ring. Somewhere in the Opera lay Erik's ring. I could hear my father when I lost a ribbon or my darning egg, _Don't cry, lill-jänta, little girl, just think back to where you had it last. Walk backwards in your mind and you'll find it_. So I did, walking back through the halls, up the stairs, up to the metal roof where Raoul and I sat in the shadow of that great statue. Then a thought struck me. When the Persian led us through the corridors, Raoul held me by my left hand, leading me along as he followed the Persian. He wouldn't have touched my hand with the ring on it. I tried hard to remember Raoul's hands on mine, and I grew cold. Had Raoul slipped it off? Or had he seen it gone from our time on the roof, and just not mentioned it?

He would never take it off, I told myself. That would give him no pleasure, for I would just replace it. But it could have fallen off then. The most likely place therefore is the roof.

So even though I yawned with tiredness in the deep of the night, I climbed all that long way back up the flies in the echoing, abandoned building, and once again up those twisted stairs. The night was thick with stars, one great sweep making a white band against the blue night. It was cold and silent, and although I crept across almost the entire metal surface bent on my hands and knees like an old woman, no lost coin appeared to me in the crack of the floor, nor ring either.

I had stood by the edge of the roof when we first came up, as Raoul and I looked out over the expanse of the Seine river valley. Perhaps it had slipped off my finger and fallen to the street below. The thought of going down to the street, where no doubt someone had already picked it up, pocketed, and pawned it, filled me with despair.

Cold, bereft, I started to cry. A vast black emptied itself out inside me. There was no point in continuing this farce. Raoul would soon find out that he brought a trull to his bed and a cuckoo into his nest, for my courses had not yet come. And I had invited him to lie with me like a common streetwalker not an hour before. The sidewalk below lured me. It would be so easy, a rush of wind, a fall for only a few seconds, an incredible shock of pain, and then nothing, nothing that is save the flames of hell, which I would find at the end anyway.

Joined with Erik, and then a great lump choked me, the thought that the pains of hell for me could include being joined to Erik forever in eternity, chained together on the same burning brazier, lying in an eternal embrace of fire. Then I cried freely, sobbing into the night with no one to hear as I leaned over the low edge of the roof.

"Mademoiselle Daaé," a voice called from behind me, soft but full of command. "Mademoiselle, please turn around very slowly. I don't wish to frighten you. I fear for your safety. Turn around and take your time, so you don't startle."

I knew who it was before I even saw him. "Monsieur Daroga," I said. "It is late for you to be up on this roof."

"Late for you, too, Mademoiselle. Good, that's fine. Step down off that little stair near the edge, that's right," and when I had both feet firmly on the metal roof, he sped over to me, wrapped two long strong arms around me, and pulled me several meters away from the edge. Panting, he said, "Can I let you go now with assurance that you will not jump?"

I flushed with shame. "You saw that."

"I thought that for you followers of Isa it was a grave sin. It was what Erik always told me, although he was not the most reliable sometimes in matters of his religion." Then he turned those beautiful almond-shaped eyes on me, full of green compassion. "To get away from him, you must resort to that?"

Looking away, I said, "What do you know of me? What has he told you?"

"That you are his, and that you are to leave together tomorrow night. I didn't believe him. Erik ..." and here he sighed heavily, "Erik has a tendency to stretch the truth."

"Does he stretch the truth when he says he will 'leave a hole in Paris humanity' if I leave, when he says insane things like that?"

His brown face grew paler. "He has said that to you?"

"Or something like it. Something raving, anyway, something about being like Lucifer falling in a ball of flame, only he's going to rise up, I can't remember, Monsieur Daroga, those words of his all blur into one great mass of madness. I try not to listen to them."

"I wish I had not." He looked out over at the city, his face in his hand. "Why did you come up here?"

"I lost his ring. The one I waved in your face."

"Yes," he said in a musing tone. "I know that one. It was said of the dwarf Andvari when he forged a ring from the Rhine river's gold, 'While love he could not gain by force, through cunning forced he love's delights.'" I looked at him blankly. "Wagner," he said. "But never mind. He's not popular in France. Would you like me to help you search?"

"I don't know if I want it back, now. Raoul and I … we leave tomorrow. When I am gone, I don't think a lost ring will be Erik's greatest worry."

"The young officer, you love him?"

"Yes," I said. Then I looked at him, hard. "It's not all on my head, you know. He told me about you, and about your sister. Erik said that on the morning after he killed her, the two of you had coffee and worked on your building plans as if nothing had happened."

"Those two young men no longer exist. Do not judge me too harshly, Mademoiselle. Then I was a cold, hard youth, caring only for my own place at court and advancement. But my heart has been softened since by suffering. Do not judge him too harshly either, even though you want to get away from him, and I understand why you do. For he was not the man then that he is now, and I have my own sins to bear, sins that contributed to the hardening of his heart."

"He calls you 'betrayer.'"

"I know," the dark man said, and when he sighed he reminded me so much of Erik, as if those sighs came from the same chest. "And before the cock crows on the morning after the morrow, he will no doubt have cause to call me betrayer again."

"You will help us?" I asked, a small hope flickering. "Because I do not see how we can get away without Erik seeing."

"I will watch, and wait. Do not look for me, for if you do not need me I will not be seen." He offered me his hand and I took it, feeling the cool palm and the firm clasp of his fingers. "It would not be prudent for us to go down together," he said. "But just to reassure me that your life is secured, I want you to go ahead of me. Take heart, Mademoiselle Daaé. It is a difficult position in which you find yourself, but I think you aim at the right target."

"He is going to suffer."

"I know," he said, with such compassion that the pain radiated through my heart. "But I will try to help him, even if he does not let me."

As I went down the iron staircase, I listened for his steps behind me, although they had vanished.

(_continued_...)


	21. Ange Pur

**Ange Pur**

I tremble like a leaf blowing across an autumn sky, even though it is still summer, on this night so full of summer that it penetrates my heart and melts some of the ice.

This morning I went out to the garden and had a long look, as if seeing it for the first time. It's no longer brown, because I've found a man to water it. This week I shall find someone to clear the weeds, sweep last year's dead grass, prune the fruit trees.

I will prune the fruit trees of my heart as well.

M. Peillard – Jacques – came to see me today, just before tea-time. He strode into the foyer and a warm red-brown light followed him, the silver in his hair scarcely noticeable in the midst of the flame. He was apologetic and I could not make him see there was no need for contrition. "I've troubled you," he said over and over. "You must let me take you out to a restaurant."

"Not in the least." For I wanted him to see our home, and if it still felt like Raoul, if the feel of Raoul was still upon it, then it was his choice to endure it or to go. I wanted to see if he would endure it. "It's a pleasure to have you. We'll have tea in the library."

The big dim room was recently dusted, but the smell of disuse remained upon it. Unlike many men, Raoul hadn't kept the library jealously to himself. Most of the bookcases were filled with law tomes and volumes of maritime history and technology, for use in his patent work. But other shelves held some of the children's school books, as well as the adventure and boy's stories he and Philippe and Louvel loved. On the wall to the right of desk hung a portrait, commissioned by Philippe and Martine for his fiftieth birthday. A slight smile, a warmth and softness of his features offset his grave and substantial demeanor in respectable middle-class black. I am more than what I appear, he seemed to say.

M. Peillard looked steadily at Raoul's portrait, then commented, "A remarkable likeness, just like the man I met with M. Gagnepain. He had kind eyes."

"He did," I said softly, and my throat clutched a little.

"How did he pass?"

"He had walked to his office at the Bourse, like all the other mornings before that. When he got there, he complained to his secretary of a headache, and then cried out that he couldn't see. He fell over at his desk. They brought him home and he never really came back to us. He died three days later."

"A hard ending for a long life together."

"The doctors argued about whether it had been apoplexy or the bursting of a vessel in the brain. Before the funeral, they wanted to cut him open and find out. I'm afraid I wasn't very civilized about telling them they couldn't."

"What did you do?"

"I went for the poker from the fireplace. Philippe had to hold onto me and ask them to leave at the same time. I wasn't very rational. You were going to say something, but changed your mind. What was it?"

He swallowed hard. "It had occurred to me that their motives were purely from scientific curiosity, from the desire to investigate. However, it was insensitive and imprudent, I will confess."

"What did it matter? There was nothing they could do for him. He died in our arms, Philippe on one side, I on the other. Martine was out of the room just for an instant, some yelling from the children that she couldn't just let the nursemaid handle."

"I've made you feel sorrowful. I am indeed sorry."

He had on a creamy linen summer suit, and he still carried with him that warm flame-like light, made warmer by the evening sun and the burnished mahogany of Raoul's study. "I don't mind telling you. He had lost so many opportunities in life, and yet he was a contented man. I am often not happy, not in that same sun-filled way as Raoul. But he made me happy, and I think that is all one can ask."

I poured out for him. As we ate and drank, largely in silence, I waited for the other questions I had expected and which had not yet come, not in our weeks of correspondence, and not now.

He refused a second cup, and instead walked over to the window with that thick, fleshy stride of his, that I so liked to admire, and looked out over the grounds shabby in the slanting orange light of late afternoon. "There was once a fountain there," he exclaimed, standing on his toes like a great boy trying to get a better view.

"Would you like to go outside for a better look?" He didn't answer, but headed for the rear parlor door. I followed him through the house, shaking my head with impatience in one direction and laughing the next. He reminded me of Louvel big and grown but still boyish. He nearly collided with the maid removing the tray, ignoring her astonishment.

I brought my fan, for it was hot as we walked around the shabby garden. He knew plants, and several times bent down to feel the earth between his fingers, frowning. "You're a man of many talents, M. Peillard. What else do you know besides lawyering, and sleuthing, and gardening? And why have you no garden of your own?"

He looked at me with his wide brown eyes, spectacles flashing. "We grew up near Giverny, a small village. My father was the investigating magistrate in town and was seldom home. He lived at his club, it seemed. So my mother gardened, until she left." He said this so baldly that it embarrassed me.

"I'm sorry..." I murmured.

"No, no," he waved his hand at me, and dirt sprayed across the walkway. "You're right, we apologize to each other far too much. My mother wasn't French, she was English, and she didn't understand."

"Well, I'm not French either, and neither do I ... 'understand.' Understand what?"

"How a man can have a wife and son at home, and still want a man's life in the city, undisturbed by the cares of a household."

"I see," I said stiffly. "In that case, now that I understand what you mean, I can tell you with certainty that my husband and I had no such 'understanding.' If you know what I mean."

He nodded in agreement. "I was thirteen when she left. My father put me in school and continued to live at his club. Then I read the law, lived at my father's club until I came to employment with M. Gagnepain. So you see, since childhood I have never really had what you call a garden of my own. Now I save M. Gagnepain some of the cost of a gardener, at least on Saturday afternoons." He brushed the earth from his hands. "Swedish, you said. Although Daaé, that's Danish, right?"

"My father had a brother in Copenhagen. But I never met any of our Danish relatives, though."

"Daaé, Daaé," he said to himself, and I braced, waiting for the barrage of questions. But he just said, "You need a new gardener."

"It's not the lack of a gardener," I remarked. "It's the lack of will. My husband looked after the garden. I don't know how to organize it. It seems disloyal, almost."

He surveyed it. "The organization is all there, all laid out. Did he plan it?" and I nodded. "It just needs some work." He caressed the blackberry canes grown wild, and pulled off some berries left behind, under the leaves. He handed a few to me and ate the others himself. "It needs some love."

"Tell me about your mother's garden," I said, feeling myself go pink. The berry was sweet in my mouth, large and very juicy, and I wondered how the cook had missed it.

"She had hollyhocks twice my height, and lilac bushes that I could hide under. My brother and I chased each other and she never scolded us if we broke a twig or two. There were morning-glories as wide as a dinner plate, blue and white and violet. It all ran wild, seemingly, but she worked on it every day. There were statues of fauns, and a nymph that carried a water jug, where the spigot was."

I looked sadly at our fountain, dry as dust, of the kind of stone that glows gold in sunset light. "It sounds beautiful. So was this one in its heyday. I looked at him quizzically. "You don't sound like your letters."

"It's the curse of the attorney's training. You get to sounding just like your pompous old law books." Then he turned to me, flushed quite pink himself, his thick auburn side whiskers bristling. "I didn't think you'd write me back, not after that day in Paris when you left the cafe. I put that letter in my vest pocket and didn't remove it until the next one arrived."

"M. Peillard ..." I began.

"I know what you're thinking," he waved. "No fool like an old fool. Will you call me Jacques? Not Lalonde, I can't bear that. They called me that at school."

"Of course not."

"You don't sound like your letters either."

"Oh? And how do I sound?"

"Like a young girl, fresh and starting life."

"You're swimming into deep water, Jacques Lalonde."

He withdrew, wincing and laughing at the same time. "I deserved that, didn't I?"

"Perhaps a little."

"There's a little park I passed in the cab, down past the intersection of the main boulevard. Stroll with me down there. There's something I want to talk with you about, something of great importance."

I hesitated. I still wore the strip of black on my lapel, even though I had dispensed with black crepe and netting over my face, much to the shock of some. Honor the living, Raoul would say, not the dead, as he told Martine some years ago when Jannecke's mother died. Martine used the occasion to order an entire new wardrobe all in various shades of black, as well as black frocks for the girls, who were barely out of long baby skirts. A ridiculous extravagance, Raoul fumed, but Martine was mistress in her own home and at the time Jannecke admired her apparent respect.

Now the whole business seemed tiresome to me, the black-trimmed paper, the veiled hats, the whispering and circumspect trepidation one used when approaching the widow. Excusing myself, I went to put on a grey hat trimmed with parrot feathers, each grey feather with a little maroon stripe around the base, and a strip of wine-colored velvet on the band.

He gave me his arm, and we walked largely in silence. His arm was wide around, and my hand nestled up against his side, feeling the muscle slide as he walked. Red velvet streaks painted the sky, and the birds flew wildly about, looking for a nest. On a faux-Greek temple grew vines so high that they almost reached the top. Fat orange flowers like trumpets hung on them heavily. Into the foliage the little birds crept, then sang their song even louder as they nestled down.

He turned to me and took my hands in his. "Madame de Chagny, I don't know where to begin. You'll think me impudent, I know..."

"Christine," I whispered. "Please, Christine."

"Yes," he said. "Thank you. Very well," and he cleared his throat a few times. "In your last letter you said you were going to spend some weeks in London, and then from London would go to Perros-Guirec on the Brittany coast."

"Yes?" I said, wondering where this led.

"Christine, this is important. You need to make for yourself a place to live outside Brussels. Anywhere but Belgium. I've listened to things yesterday and the day before, and they make my head spin. Is Paris safe? If I thought Paris would be safe, I would tell you to come to Paris. Perhaps I am overreacting or having the masculine equivalent of the vapors, that I see spooks with spiked helmets under every bush."

"Jacques," I said, confused. "I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about." He still gripped my hands, and I let him, liking the warmth of his thick paws.

"War, Christine. The German diplomats came and talked to Albert your King, to your prime minister and cabinet, and I fear that while your sovereign is a good man, a kind man and the best ruler you will have, he doesn't understand what brews on his borders."

"That's nonsense," I said. "He will not be fooled by the Prussians. The whole world knows of our neutrality."

"The world hears only what it wants to hear. Your king won't listen to those who want to expand the Belgian army. Why do we need a bigger army? they say. What use does a neutral country have of a large standing army?"

"You sound like my younger son, Louvel," I remarked. "He writes me letters begging me to come to America, and to bring Martine and Jannecke with me. He's young and impetuous, and an American now. What does he know of Belgium anymore?"

"He sounds like a wise young man," Peillard said with a serious face.

"But how can you know this?" I said. "You reported on diplomatic meetings, yes. But how can you know more than the men who rule this land?"

"I don't," he said, abashed. "But if it does come about that my country and Germany come to blows, your fields and farms and this beautiful city will be right in the center of the ring."

"It's a horrible thing to think about."

"Sometimes horrible possibilities require our attention. When we neglect them, more horrible things come to pass. What is Perros like, Christine? I've never been there, so tell me about it."

"It's small, a village really, but with hotels and bathing houses built up on the shore. You take the train to Lannion, and then there is a small train that goes to Perros-Guirec. You used to have to go by stage, it was quite tiresome. But it's beautiful, with great red rocks and what did the Greek poet call it? a wine-dark sea. In the autumn and winter there are very few Parisians there, and it will be quiet, and still, and I will go to watch the ocean."

And write, I thought, but did not say that.

"Are there houses that one can buy?"

I looked at him strangely. What did he have in mind? "Yes, sometimes there are. There are so many tourists now that sometimes when a farmer is old, or sick, and has no sons to take over for him, he will sell. It used to be unheard of, and the older villagers still talk of it for weeks when that happens. It is as if a piece of the living heart of their village was being ripped out."

We walked to a little hillock in the center of the park, where the peaked slate roofs of Brussels could just be seen over the trees. "It sounds beautiful," he said. Then he turned to me, taking my hands again tenderly. "I think you should buy a house there, and make it ready to live in all year round."

"Of course they can be lived in all year, as long as the barn is filled with hay, the woodpile well stacked, and the cribs full of potatoes," I answered. "Our cottage in Perros, where Papa and the Valeriuses and I stayed wasn't that much different than the cottage I grew up in, a little nicer, maybe. In fact, I think that's why I love Perros-Guirec so much, because it's so close in many ways to home. No, not the terrain, or the vegetation, or the trees. But there's a spirit about the place that brings me back. It's the age, I think, so old, even with the new railroad and restaurants and hotels. Something there is still very old."

"Can you grow potatoes?" he asked, eyes laughing.

"I know everything about potatoes. All I did was hoe potatoes, from when I was old enough to grasp a hoe. The potatoes and I are on the best of terms."

"Then you will take my advice?"

"I will think about it. You know, with firewood and a cow, potatoes and cabbages, you can live pretty well."

"So says the elegant lady of Brussels." He put his arm around my shoulder in the cool evening air, and I did not withdraw. His body was very full and he smelled of apple-scented pipe tobacco.

"Not so elegant," I murmured. "After all, I was an actress." Then I swallowed hard, because there was still so much unsaid, and he had not yet asked. But I want him to ask, I'm tired of carrying this burden all these decades. It's time to lay it down, all of it.

He was a little shorter than Raoul, and his chin did not go quite over the top of my head. So he rested the side of his face on my hair, pushing my hat aside, and I pulled it off. "Let's walk," he said, swallowing hard.

So with hat in hand I strolled with him down to the pond whose glossy water rapidly turned deep purple in the approaching night. I picked up a stone and tossed it casually into the water, making a loud plop! "When will you write your article?" I asked.

"When I take my leave of you."

I stirred the purple water with a stick, and didn't need to look at him to feel his eyes on me. "All this time we have written," I said, "Every day, sometimes twice, and never once have you asked me about the strange situation at the National Opera so long ago."

"No, I have not," he said, and his voice was as almost as still as the now-sleeping birds.

"Why not, Jacques? Did your curiosity desert you?"

"Not in the least. But there is no need to ask when newspapers and the records of the National Opera library are open to journalists. Or men wanting to be journalists."

I sat by the side of the pond, and he sat near me, very close. "I thought you would beg, and plead. To know."

"I thought so too. But something lay before me, a path through the woods that came to a fork. One path would lead me to sit here with you, and perhaps I would never know, for the nonsense you read in these newspapers, you would not believe. That first path, there I would be with my partial knowledge, but would sit here as I imagined, under a thin sliver of moon quivering in the water. The other path, oh, there's always another path, isn't there? That path would lead to forcing you open like a clam, interviewing people, searching out those young enough or sound enough of mind to speak of those nights, those odd events, and then I would have my article, my story, a book perhaps. But you, no, not you, because the best I could hope for was that you would slap my face before refusing to speak to me at all."

"And the worst?"

"I don't even think about the worst," he said, gently pulling me into his warm circle again, "because I did not take that path. And so that worst thing will not happen, will never happen."

"What do you mean?" I murmured, although I thought I knew.

"Quite simply this, Christine of the deep mystery. I've fallen in love with you. And to pursue you through the halls of history, especially a history you hold close to your heart, would be like peeling off your skin. Still, there's something strange about you, some glamour that will not fade, as if you had seen things that few women have, or should, strange things, unknowable things."

"Do you fish for my story, Jacques?"

"I didn't fall in love with your story, whatever it may be," he answered. "But I know it's there, inside you. It may go with you to your grave. Oh, you're trembling. I didn't mean ... no, don't cry, please, it unnerves me entirely."

But cry I did, just a little, enough to wet my own handkerchief and not have to accept his. To tell, to confess, to bring forth not just on this blank page, but to another heart beating in time with one's own. Such a heart it was, huge and ponderous it pounded beneath the silk of his vest, as I lay my head down on that broad breast and silently shook.

He stroked my hair, my neck, under my chin. My arms almost went around him, not quite, for he was big of belly and barrel-chested. Somewhere far away a night-bird called sharp and sweet, and another answered. When I raised my chin and kissed his mouth he looked a little surprised, but I didn't pull away. I kissed him until he kissed me back, shy at first and then eager, his hesitancy a bit like Raoul's early kisses but not quite. There was no rush, for one thing. No one was hunting me through Paris, or demanding that I choose between one man or the next. No one demanded I choose, and so I chose to kiss Jacques for no other reason than that I wanted to.

His spectacles bumped my nose. "Wait," he said, breaking away. He put them into his jacket pocket but his eyes stayed open and on mine the whole time. Amazed yet expectant he swallowed me in his arms, embraced me with his open mouth.

Wiry and full, his moustache tickled my upper lip, so I pulled his lower one between mine and licked it gently. Comfort and desire rolled over me just from having him near me, warm and pillowed. Down his tongue went into my mouth, a new taste, a new tongue, new lips, new hair, and all new flesh under my hands. His body was damp under his linen jacket, and I ran my hands underneath with glee, loving the sweaty warmth of him, the round flesh under his arms, and the deep kisses he laid across my ears and neck and throat.

The hat fell from my hand, and it wasn't until we broke for breath that I noticed it had fallen into the pond. It had drifted away across the water like some little grey bird floating on its own for the first time.

We walked back mostly in a silence that sang through my body. The bedraggled hat left a trail of drips that vanished behind us in the night. When he stood at my back door, hidden by the arbor hanging with wild uncut vines, he kissed me once more and I cried out without words.

He was the first to speak. "What shall we tell your children?"

The children? I thought of eyes indifferent, eyes amused, eyes censorious. Jannecke would smile in that weak, tolerant way of his. Anki would wink and say, Mother de Chagny, you're only human. I saw Louvel's eyes, smiling. Only Philippe and Martine's eyes bored into me, sharp corkscrews of disapproval. "Some will be harder than others," I murmured.

He left shortly after because, as he explained, he was taking an early train back to Paris, one that left just before dawn. He kissed my fingers and told me he loved me again, although I did not say the same back to him. I had no sense of urgency or rush. He said he would write. Now he is gone, but only for a time. I feel something has been ratified. It is too soon for me to speak of love, but for the first time, I have kissed a man whom I have utterly, freely, and completely chosen.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

When I arrived for my final performance at the National Opera, the whispering started from the first moment I emerged from the cab. A group of men dancers outside the Rue Halévy entrance smoked and chattered like parrots. If their mocking laughter had been swords, not one passing soul would have remained standing on the street. When I swept by they fell silent and stared, grinning like apes.

"Good catch, Daaé," one called out, not unfriendly.

"Two big fish reeled in on one night," said another with a wide waxed moustache. "Not bad."

"Why can't I get one of those for my very own?" a third man moaned, rolling his eyes.

The first slapped him at him playfully. "Greedy. You brought home two last week."

"Nothing of that caliber," he retorted. "No de Chagny warms _my_ bed."

Their snickers faded as the doorman closed the big brass slab against the noise of the street. But it was laughter that repeated all through the evening, laughter I heard and laughter I only imagined, from the whispers of the chorus girls to the sneer of La Sorelli herself, who demanded to see what kind of ring the young nobleman had given me. When she saw my bare finger she sniffed to a few of her avidly-watching claque, "Were he really marrying her, she'd be wearing a diamond as big as one of Venus's nipples. I don't know what the Comte is worried about," and the other girls cackled like geese at her wit.

The costumers grimaced to each other as they pinned me into Carlotta's peasant dress. I dreaded the whole long first half of _Faust_, where Marguerite has very little to do. There I sat in a dusty little room with students and wenches and a few men dancers, and _L'Epoque _was passed around in front of me. I carefully avoided looking at the article which gave them so much amusement, although I knew that both Raoul's and my name were mentioned in it. Blushing under my caking paint, I shook so badly that when I finally took the stage, the tenor Fonta looked me over with serious concern.

"Eyes up," he mouthed when I stared down at my embroidered slippers. So I did, facing the cold and critical audience. Backstage stares slid through me like knives. In the blurred distance I heard the whispers of the audience punctuated by faint chilly applause and more chatter.

What would they do, I thought, if I kicked this spinning wheel over right now and ran for the exit? They'd find it oh so entertaining. They'd give me an ovation worthy of Carlotta.

Then, as if calling her to mind made her magically appear, Carlotta and her entourage filed into an empty box on the first tier. She flung off her wide white shoulders a rippling silver fur. Beside her stood an older man, white hair flying, glasses reflecting in the limelight, and behind him a whole crowd of dandies and hangers-on. They talked so loudly I could hear Carlotta's sharp tones even above the orchestra. They leaned over the box's edge frankly staring, as if they saw trained monkeys on the stage instead of performers. Over the gilded edge a man with high teased hair dangled Carlotta's fur wrap, shaking it like a fishing lure. From their box came the loud pop! of a champagne bottle being uncorked.

Something went red inside me when I began the "Jewel Song." I glared directly up at Carlotta's box, thinking, You great hyena, you come in laughing, but I will show you, and then it was as if Erik filled me with a great pillar of song, or perhaps with the great pillar of himself. My diaphragm relaxed, my lower belly pushed up with a great surging force, and that column which pierced me from bottom to top burst through my mouth and emerged in a fountain spray of sound.

Never has a Marguerite betrayed a man so throughly as I betrayed the innocent Siebel that night. What flooded out of me was Erik, all Erik, his rage, his disappointment, my resentment and frustration at having being deceived, locked up, smacked, bullied. His rage was mine, mine was his, and they flowed together in a sweet tide as Marguerite cast aside the flowers from the man who truly loved her. Then Marguerite made her choice and opened the casket of jewels – the prop even shaped like a small coffin, to make the point clearer – jewels sent from the man who deceived her and pretended to be what he was not. Siebel's bouquet fell to the stage floor, abandoned.

And my Siebel, my poor Siebel did not share his brother's box that night, but instead sat in the orchestra's third row and stared at me as if he had never seen me before. On that stage, with the discarded flowers on my one side, the coveted jewels to the other, a great choice presented itself – the carriage that waited to take me away to a garden, or the key that led into a tomb. There was the sweet man on one hand, and on the other the _djinn_ beneath the earth, who when I invoked him made me sing like a woman possessed. Before me swam the casket and the tomb, or flowers and the life of the earth.

The audience had stopped talking. Carlotta herself leaned over the box edge, and her fur slipped down from the balcony and lightly thumped on the floor below. For a long second no one moved or spoke.

The applause that followed was thunderous, and every soul looked to every other one, right or left, with comments and gestures, pointing at me and Fonta. Now that I was no longer singing I started to shake, the kind of trembling that seizes a person when she has been terribly angry and has just begun to calm down. I realized with a little shock that if I climbed into Raoul's carriage at the end of that evening's performance, I would never sing again, not like this, painted and decorated before _le tout Paris_. I would disappear as thoroughly as Erik disappeared into the bowels of the Opera when he did not want to be seen.

Backstage Fonta kissed my cheek and whispered, "That was beautiful, _carissima_. I've never heard anyone do that. My heart breaks for Marguerite."

Mine too, I thought as I squeezed his hand. When I changed into the filmy shift of Marguerite's prison dress, I pulled off the blonde braided wig. Down my hair went like a shroud over my bare shoulders. I was ready to meet my doom for having loved Faust, borne his child, and then killed it.

As I sat in prison, I wondered as I had so many times before about this scene, could I have done this to a baby in its cradle? Could I blame Marguerite, when her lover abandoned her to shame and misfortune? I crossed my hands over my own belly and a little nausea flicked at me, just a touch, but not the kind that comes from eating bad fish or drinking too much champagne. It buzzed me a little around the edges, almost a chemical feeling, and I shook myself, hard.

Then there was Faust, yearning, entreating me to come through the magical opening in the prison wall that Mephistopheles had forged with his dark art. And there was my own sweet Siebel, no longer sitting in his orchestra seat, but standing, arms outstretched as if to say, No, Marguerite, don't do it, don't go with him, it's not too late, I will still offer you flowers and there is still time for you to press them to your breast, weave them into your hair, because although I have no jewels of music to offer you, I have life itself.

There must have been something about him so pathetic, so tragic that those sitting around him were moved enough not to roughly pull or shove him back down into his seat. It was as if Raoul were part of the performance itself, some newly-scripted insert that they feared to disturb and thus run afoul of the composer's intent. So all throughout the final lamentation, where Faust finally understands that Marguerite would rather go to the scaffold than return to his bed, my Siebel stood before me like an offering. Then he put his hands to his face and sank into his seat, weeping openly and without shame, overcome.

Faust and Mephistopheles moved out of the way as the final scene commenced. Marguerite won't be hung at all, instead, she will be taken up to heaven just as the Blessed Virgin was. The gears of the cloud machines behind me creaked. The great platform covered with gauze and fluff lowered for me to mount it.

"_Ange pur_," I sang, "_Ange radieux_..." Angels pure and radiant, lift me up to you. Lift me up to my Siebel, because this is my goodbye to you all, to Erik, my farewell to singing like a bacchante who chants not her own tune but the song of her god, goodbye to the paint and machines and ropes that make up this world of illusion. I stepped back, ready to put my foot onto the platform and be hoisted up into the clouds. It was the end of a performance of a kind never before seen by these jaded Parisian eyes.

Everything went black as the inside of a cave.

I screamed and flailed, then stumbled and tripped on my dress. My foot came down into a hole, or a space where the floor or the platform should have been, and I fell over, suddenly gripped by nausea. The whole room tilted on its axis, and in the utter black I couldn't tell up from down. I scrabbled blindly for the floor, for any fixed point of reference, and then on my grasping arm I felt a hand.

His hand, and cold. Terribly cold.

I never knew how he got me off the stage, because at that instant a cloth slammed over my face, and under the weight of the sickly-sweet stench of chloroform I went limp.

Around I spun, whirling like a top through the black, up and down, back and forth. The spinning slowed, and everything wobbled, tottered, then fell over onto its side. But it was no child's toy who lay there sick and abandoned. I thought I was still on the stage, and fumbled around, expecting to feel the hard dusty floor. Instead my hands grabbed at soft cloth, a plushy surface, a soft pillow. Despair seized me, as well as mounting sickness. It can't be, I thought. This is madness. When the whirling stopped I carefully opened my eyes. The Sun King's ladies mounted on the wall shimmied back and forth, and the bile rose in my throat.

This can't be real, I thought. I've hit my head and it's rattled my brains so that I dream this is my room underneath the opera. That can't be Erik sitting on the side of the bed with his jacket off.

But it was. As I tried to focus my eyes, a wave of nauseating motion flattened me. When it receded, I leaned over the side of the bed and spewed all over the Aubusson carpet.

He cleaned it up without comment. The sharp stench remained as I lay on the bed, refusing to look at him. While he rinsed rags in the bathroom, I tried to get out of bed, but couldn't because of the dizziness. "Erik," I cried out, "I'm going to be sick again," and this time he caught in a basin something yellow and full of bile. He wiped my face as I slapped at his hands. The motion made me sick again, so I lay curled on my side shaking. He hovered over me and muttered to himself, "Too much, Erik has given her too much, just like the first time with the perfume. She's such a small thing, it's hard to know how much to use."

He brought me a clean basin with some tooth powder, and I rinsed my mouth. "I'm thirsty," I complained.

"Not yet," he answered. "Or you'll deliver a repeat performance."

Slowly my head cleared. When he went to empty the basin I struggled to get out of bed but was too slow. Around the waist he caught me and pulled me back down. "You'll never leave your Erik," he said into my ear, in quiet tones that terrified me more than his rages. "You'll never go out of his sight again. I wanted to bring you before Paris in triumph, but look how you've repaid me, dallying with a lover, planning to run away with him, thinking you could hide on the roof. It matters not, in some ways it's better. You can sing for an audience of one. Erik doesn't need you on the stage; he has quite enough money for the both of us. A husband should provide for his wife," and he laughed low, nastily.

He leaned into me so close that the smell of spiced wine on his breath and the drug on his hands made my gorge rise once more. I pushed him away and moaned, "You can't keep me here. Someone will come looking for me."

"My loving wife," he said, papering over with calmness the sneer underneath, "as far as Paris is concerned, you're a 'light' girl from the Opera. You have no friends, not counting that ineffectual boy, and no protector, no patron, no prominent man to miss you at some rendezvous. Girls like you wind up in the back alleys of the Pigalle every month, and they go into an unmarked pauper's grave. How long do you think they'll look for you?"

He went on, his quiet voice driving me into the bed as intensely as his body once had. "What did you tell me your boy called you? As I recall, it was 'that Scandinavian sprite,' 'that opera wench,' wasn't it?"

"He was angry and jealous," I said. "He didn't mean it." Then I grew sick again, not from the chloroform but from knowing that Raoul waited for me, expected to see me, and oh God, probably thought that I had left with Erik after all.

Erik stood over me like a black column of death but I stared back at him. My despair turned to anger when he said, "Well, I have given you my name before God, and will do so before man as well. Erik has broken oaths, but this is one I will not break."

"Your name?" I retorted. "I don't even know your true name. That's why you seduced me into this false marriage, this sham, because you could not put your name on the registry papers."

"Oh, Erik is good enough," he crooned, "but women are never satisfied, not in their curiosity or anything else. You want a name? I'll give you one. You are the wife of Erik Muspelheim," and he laughed with long cruelty.

"It fits a demon to have a name plucked from the depths of fiery hell itself."

"You disappoint me, Christine. I would have thought with your background you would know that Muspelheim isn't hell, but the realm of the fire giants, and at the end of the world they will come forth and leave all of Valhalla in flaming rubble. Which is what I will do if you continue to give me trouble."

I tried once more to dash from the bed, but only stumbled onto the carpet. Lifting me up like a doll, he pulled me close to his body of steel and bone, and placed two long hard hands around my throat. Instead of squeezing, he stroked my neck gently and said, "In here you'll stay, Madame Muspelheim, bride of death, until you see reason. Until you can learn to act like a proper wife, and not a wanton slut." Never taking his eyes off me, he backed out of the room, and when the lock clicked I buried my face in the pillow that smelled now of sickness instead of Erik.

A quick search through the room revealed nothing sharp, no weapon. The shears I had taken with me into the bathroom so long ago were gone, and not so much as a hatpin remained. The tub had been shut off, and while the tiny sink had water, it wouldn't accommodate my head. Then the desperation of my position sank in. He thought of everything. I might try to flee from him into the arms of death, but this jealous lover would deny me even that.

But there was one fixture he couldn't remove, and slowly, methodically, I began to bang my head against the wall. It hurt more than I could imagine, and when the first stains of blood marked the wall, I stopped, sick and terrified. In my mind I saw a whole host of demons, all like Erik or worse, making my body and soul their plaything for the rest of eternity.

He must have heard the thumping. When he entered and saw the blood on my face, he staggered to his knees and tried to embrace my legs, but I kicked at him. He raised himself up to his full height and slapped me lightly on the face, snarling, "What game is this? You think a person is easy to kill? Believe my expert opinion when I say the body does not give up its life that willingly."

"You'll have to kill me, then, because I would rather die than live another day as your wife."

"Stupid girl," he said, "you know nothing of death." He ripped Marguerite's garish costume crucifix from my neck and tossed it aside. "Little pious one, are you so willing to court hell?"

"Since when do you believe in hell?" I snapped back. "You act as if you fear no one, least of all God. If you try to keep me here as your wife, I will kill myself."

"If you do not live openly with me as my wife, then I promise you, I will kill not only you but myself as well, and bury everyone else along with us. Think carefully; Erik may break oaths, but I keep my word."

Around me he wrapped his iron-banded arms and dragged me to the cushioned Louis-Phillipe chair, and with scarves from the drawer tied me securely to it. "You won't cheat me by fleeing to the arms of death," he said. I clawed and spit but he went on methodically until I could move nothing but my head and neck, crying out that he was a monster, a demon, that nothing he did was hidden from the eyes of God, and that I would die before ever letting him touch me as a wife again.

He held a scarf in front of my face and said, "Will you be quiet, or shall I gag you? Let me show you what it will feel like," and he stretched the scarf across my mouth. My nose ran from all the crying, and I almost wet myself in terror, for with the thick scarf across my mouth I could scarcely breathe. He must have seen the horror on my face, for he lowered it and I took in great gasps. "Keep still," he commanded, "or I will use this. You are such a little actress, Christine. It's no wonder the Greeks called you actors and actresses 'hypocrites.' You moan about dying, but when you miss even one breath, the terror of death fills your eyes and you will do anything to draw another one, anything to live."

Then he paced back and forth, shaking his head. "So you say you would rather die than let me touch you," he said in a flat, dead tone. "Since you seem to be willing to let that boy touch you, and how he did touch you, oh, you didn't think Erik saw, but he did, he saw everything, he heard your sighs and his moans when you put your hand on his breast, but for me you had nothing, no kindness, not a single caress, and so Erik will arrange for the death of everything right now," and then I did wet myself. As it soaked the thin costume and the cushion beneath me, I sobbed in shame and horror, not even aware that he had once again left the room until the stillness enveloped me.

I sat there restrained, and every so often called for him over and over, but he didn't return for what seemed like hours. Finally, he opened the door and pulled up the other chair, sitting calmly as he looked over at me with the same investigational expression. "Christine," he said, "do you know why Erik does this?"

"Because you don't want me to leave you," I said, hoping it was the right answer.

"Because you betrayed Erik," and anger shook underneath his voice. He held up the thick gold band of my bondage, and my stomach clenched. "You were given trust, and you took it. You accepted my ring, and then I find it on the roof of the Opera _tout a la rue, _discarded like trash," and he waved it in front of my face. "You took it off and left it there, like every flit who opens her legs for the baker or butcher, but at least has the decency to take off the symbol of marriage first. You bound yourself to me, but you made love with that popinjay, that little white toadstool. How many times have you done that?" he demanded, putting the ring on his little finger, twisting his hands together.

"You know everything I do. How could I deceive you in that way?"

He came over to me and I held my breath as if it were my last. He put his hands again on my throat, but tenderly like before. My first thought was to spit in his face and then to bite, to bite as hard as I could, but some instinct corrected me and I laid my head back, exposing my neck to him fully. His caresses played over my throat. He lowered his head so that his hot cinnamony breath hovered over my breast as he whispered softly, sadly, "Christine, don't make me do this, please."

The absurdity of it almost made me laugh - how could I make him do anything, tied to a chair, mired in my own soggy waste, but I silenced laughter and lay perfectly still, open and vulnerable. He laughed a little himself, a crazy mirthless sound from deep inside the chest, and as he rose up once more, said, "You have until eleven o'clock tonight to decide. You want so badly to die? Refuse to ratify in public what you have fulfilled in secret, and you die, and I along with you."

He paced back and forth, wringing his hands. I started to cry, but not for Erik. Instead, I saw myself lying dead and broken five stories down, and the sense of abandonment racked me with sobs. He was right. Raoul might look for me, but no one would find me here, and Erik could hide my body anywhere – weigh it down with stones and drop it in the lake, stuff it in one of the great boilers that kept the Opera supplied with steam, where it would burn up like the kindling that starts the fire. I had been afraid of him before, but not like this, tied as I was to a chair, helpless with terror at the threat of the gag and of abandonment.

Don't inflame him, I told myself, but I couldn't think straight. He circled me like a cat circles its prey, endlessly rubbing his hands, smoothing what little he had of hair, muttering to himself, "Erik, don't give up on her yet, she still may see reason, she still may find it in her heart to love you," and then interrupted these monologues with great wails from the heart, "Why are you doing this to Erik? How can you hurt him so? Why did you try to run away?"

I didn't dare answer, having no idea what to say to him, terrified that anything I did say would enrage him more. He came down very close to me and almost rested his face on mine. Suddenly his voice changed from hoarse and passionate to finest silk. "We used to sing together so beautifully, do you remember?" he whispered. "What happened to that? Look at you now, with all your crying, what if you have already ruined your voice?" Then he turned away abruptly, laughing to himself without joy, "Not that it matters, does it? But perhaps we could have sung one duet before we died... I thought you would love me when we sang _Otello_. Even after that, I thought that when you sang my opera, when you heard it and knew the story, that you might. Had I been handsome I knew you would love me, but curse this face, this decrepit skin," and he began to tear at himself with his own hands as once he had forced me to stab him with mine.

"Erik," I said, fighting to stay calm. "Don't. Please don't. I think I did love you when we sang _Otello_. Yes, it's true, I thought you were handsome then. But Erik, when I took off your mask, you hit me. You hit me so hard I fell to the floor." I shook with terror and even wet a little more as I said this, because it would have been so easy for him to hurt me again as I sat there, unresisting and helpless.

He pulled at his own skin even harder, leaving long purplish-red marks. His mouth worked vainly but nothing came out. Then he rested his head on my knees and started to shudder, with sobs or anger I could not tell. "Gone," he muttered, "gone, all gone, you'll never trust Erik now," and he worked my costume back and forth in his hands, almost shredding the fine lawn fabric. The he looked up at me, eyes bleared with tears. "Your forehead is bleeding."

Sniffing, I said, "Yes, and it hurts."

He got up and winced, almost stumbling. Grasping his left upper thigh, he walked to the bathroom with a slight limp. I hadn't noticed his hesitant gait before. What was wrong with his leg? He dabbed my forehead with cold water, stroking my brow tenderly as he brushed back the hair that had matted down with blood. "There was a moment when you loved me," he said. "You can't deny it. We were singing together as we never had before, and were both ready to die of pleasure. Why can't that happen again? Why? Why does everything have to be ruined?"

He threw the rag to the floor and circled the room again. "One moment in a life, in all those decades that make up a life, and to see it gone in an instant. Then I thought, you were not afraid of me anymore ... then you tell that fancy boy, that _malakos_, that you did fear me, that Erik's face revolted you. That, Christine, was the betrayal that cut the closest. Yes, it stabbed me through to see your hands on him. When did you ever put your hands on me, save to rip off my mask or try to claw my eyes out?

"But to hear you lie, to hear you tell him that you feared my face, I would have killed you at that moment but that would have been too simple. It would have had too little style. See, I have become a Parisian after all, no longer that country boy from Rouen. Doing things properly matters to me, Christine, and if I cannot have your heart, if you refuse to love me and live with me as a real and proper wife, then Erik will show you how he has cultivated his sense of style in this great Babylon on the European Euphrates."

"How can I love you when you tie me up?"

"How can I love you if you run away? It is you who makes Erik do these things," and on he went, over and over.

I closed my eyes and wished that my ears had lids to shut as well.

"... Where were you planning to go with that boy?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "He didn't tell me."

"Well, I will tell you where I will take you. After all, it shouldn't be a secret. I had wanted an apartment by the Jardin du Luxembourg, wouldn't that have been nice? There are swans in the lakes there, and it's so much less pretentious a place to walk about than the Bois de Boulogne I could see you in a dress of purest ivory, clinging to my arm as I tipped my hat to those who passed us by, and you dipping your head in cool and remote acknowledgment.

"That was back when I thought I could trust you, however. Now I am considering new plans. I don't wash my own linens, why should I have to guard you every moment of the day? I'm done with my contract here, all my automata have been delivered, so why should I not return to Constantinople? There is a new Sultan, one who might find my work of use, and you would be with me, Christine. But you would be safe there, because you would live in the deepest part of the harem, and I would visit you, and perhaps when I secured a piano we would be able to sing together again."

Appalled, shocked, I said nothing. It was as if Erik had read my fearful thoughts of being taken to Morocco. But to be lost in the depths of the Ottoman Empire, it was too dreadful. "You would bury me in a living tomb," I said.

"If I do not believe that you will love me, really love me, and show me that you do, you will be buried in a living tomb, or a dead one. You won't cheat me by suicide, of that you can be sure. I can have you in life, or have you in death, but have you I shall."

"Against my will."

"You don't know your will. No woman knows her will, because her will is to yield to the stronger man. You doubt me? Who are you with right now? You're not in the little Vicomte's carriage, you're here with me, and soon you'll be off in mine. But what I hate above all is your hypocrisy. You did love me. You would have lain with me the first night you were here, and don't look so shocked, young woman who sticks her hand inside men's shirts. Erik may be ugly beyond measure but he is not stupid. I told you that night who I was, that I was no angel and no ghost, but a man. A man that knows when a woman looks at him with desire, and if no woman had ever before looked at Erik with desire not compelled by coin, you did.

"You stayed with me for a fortnight and then you returned, and did I reach my arm out onto the Rue-de-Notre-Dame-des-Victoires and drag you back? Did I seize your hand in mine and force my ring onto your finger? Let me refresh your memory, as that chat on the roof with your lover has apparently fogged it as badly as your foster mother's. It was you who opened the box that snapped shut on your finger like an omen, saying, Do not deceive Erik or he will bite you as this box does, and you who removed the ring from its bed of velvet while I watched. You put it on the finger that in most women connects directly to the heart, although in your case I seriously doubt it."

"It's true that I accepted your ring," I said, looking away. "But how am I to love you if you tie me up, if you bully me?"

"Bully you?" He raised himself up to his full height. "When you break a horse, is it bullying? When you train a dog to retrieve the pheasant without taking a taste for himself, is it bullying? You betrayed me, it wasn't the other way around." He looked around wildly, then walked over to the second door that led to the strange room whose many-sided walls were all draped in red silk, and said, "What was that noise? There was some noise on the other side of the wall, I heard it."

"I heard nothing, Erik," and while I strained to catch any unfamiliar sound, all was silent.

"You lied to me and betrayed me." Then he cocked his head as if something had just occurred to him. "With whom else did you dally? You said you met that great ninny of a Persian in the corridors, that man who thinks he is one step ahead of me, but little does he know I walk three steps ahead of him, and my strides are longer than his. But he is fair of face, Christine, yes, he is fair, although far fairer when he was young. So did you sojourn with him, too?"

Then I prayed silently long and hard in thanks that Erik had not seen the Persian and I talking on the roof. More than talking, because when I stepped down from the roof edge, he had caught me in his arms for a moment, and had Erik seen that, it would doubtless have driven him even wilder with jealous rage. "He frightened me in the corridor, Erik. I walked as fast as I could to get here. I would have run, had I not feared tripping on my skirt and falling in the lake."

He searched my face. "An honest answer, one of the few, probably."

I tried to keep my voice as quiet and reasonable as possible. "If I am so dishonest, such a Lilith, why not simply untie me and let me go? How can you want someone who does these things to you?" and held my breath, hoping he would not hit me or worse.

"Let you go," he whispered so low I could scarcely hear him, astonished as if I'd started reciting the multiplication table or something else equally irrelevant. "Let you go. Never. You were a virgin when you came to my bed, so however much your heart or eyes might have wandered, I knew you were pure. I made you mine, and mine you will stay, even if circumstances allowed you to betray me a thousand times. For I will not live without you for even several short months, not like the stupid husband of your predecessor on the stage, who killed the jade as she lay in that bed still smeared with adultery. But things will change, Christine. Circumstances will no longer allow you to wander, I will see to that."

Then he brought his hands up to my face as if he were going to caress me, and I looked away, because if he were to touch me, I would have cried out something angry, something hateful, and then I would have died, so I bit my lip and looked over as far as I could at the mocking cheeks and chins and bosoms of the Sun King's concubines.

He gasped and I turned to see him put his hands on his thigh as if it suddenly pained him. He stared at me like a child who's opened every Christmas present and not found the one he wanted after all that time, and who knows that nothing else remains at the bottom of the stocking, there are no more packages to open, the hangings of green have been taken down, that feast is over and done with and will not come again for another year, that is to say for a child, forever. His great dark eyes welled with tears as he saw, and realized, and thought of what it all meant, and then he cried out in a deep loud voice that rang through the room, "You don't love me! You don't love me! You don't love me!"

Die or live, I could no longer lie to him. "It's true. I don't," I said very softly, almost drowned out by the echoes. "So kill me now or untie me, Erik, because I'm wet, and I want a fresh dress." The sob which he gave was that of a child's. He wept there silently for a moment. "Please," I begged. "Please let me loose. I won't hurt myself or try to run away."

"So many times you've said that," he sniffed, although he fumbled with one of the bonds, blinded by tears. He managed to loosen the knot a little but couldn't get it to unravel, for his hands shook like an old man's. He gave up and rested his forehead on my wrist, using it to wipe away his hot tears.

I thought of what I would do when he set me free. To run seemed like madness, but whatever happened, I could not let him force me on board a ship, if that was indeed his plan and simply not an idle threat meant to terrify me. "Oh, Erik," I said softly. "Never did you fail to untie your own knots," and I begged, but he just caressed my hand with his face, and then rested his head very still upon it. I thought I heard a slight shift, a creak from behind the wall, but it had to be imagination, and Erik didn't move. The minutes passed.

Then a buzzer rang, sharp and shrill, and he jerked his head up. He looked astonished for a moment, and then said, "I fear I've caught a mouse, and I must see whether it is worth releasing or whether I should snap its little neck right now." His face had a wild, crazed expression, and there was no point in reminding him he had planned to untie me. It's Raoul, I thought at once. He has come to find me, and he's out there somewhere looking for a way in. Erik grimaced and hissed from between his teeth, "Pray it's not the one you wait for, if you care about his life," and he sped out of the room.

I closed my eyes and quietly wept. His mad remarks pounded in my head until I heard Raoul's voice shout my name from the other side of the bedroom wall.

"Where are you?" I cried out. "Oh, God, I can't believe it's you. I thought you might have been outside, by the front door."

"Oh, merciful Allah, not the front door," a voice came, but it was not Raoul's.

"Raoul!' I cried. "Who is that with you? Are you there?"

"We're in a room lined with mirrors," Raoul said in clipped tones, "and there's a door but we can't get it open."

"We?" I said confused. Mirrors? "You must be wrong, I've been through that room, and it was covered with red silk hangings."

"Yes, Mademoiselle," came that other voice. "That is Erik's way when he passes through and does not wish to see his reflection. But the curtains are gone now."

"Monsieur Daroga?" I asked. "Are you there too? What is that room?"

"Christine," Raoul interrupted, "there is a door but it's locked. You must find the key and let us out."

"I can't," I said. "I'm bound, and lucky I'm not gagged as well. I know where the key is, though. Erik has it in his room."

"Where is Erik?" the daroga asked.

"I don't know. He said something about a mouse caught in a trap, and he was either going to spring it or snap its neck. How long does that take?" I asked the Persian. "I fear he'll be back any second."

"It depends," the older man answered, his voice full of woe.

"Why are you tied up?" Raoul said. "What has happened to you? Stay calm but speak as fast as you can, before he returns."

"I tried to kill myself," and Raoul interjected, "No!" The Persian hushed him. I went on, "He's going to take me away somewhere, he says Turkey. But he won't ever let me go, and if I don't stay with him, he says he'll kill me and himself as well."

"The villain is forcing you to marry him, then?"

I hesitated, and held suspended in my heart what I feared to tell Raoul. If he thinks Erik has already possessed me, he might leave, and then I truly would be trapped forever. "Yes," I said, hoping he didn't hear the lie in my voice. "He is threatening to make me marry him."

Raoul and the Persian talked together, hasty and indistinct, the Persian calming Raoul down. Finally the daroga said, "Mademoiselle, you must get that key from Erik."

"Persuade him to untie you," Raoul chimed in.

"He was about to before the buzzer rang," I said. "What is that room you are in, and how did you get there?"

"We're trapped, as you are," Raoul said.

The Persian told him to hush. "Don't discourage her," I thought he muttered. Then he addressed me. "Does he know we are here?"

"I don't think so. He heard a noise some moments ago, but it didn't concern him."

"Good. For all our lives' sake, he must not know we are here, and I address that to you as well, Monsieur le Vicomte. It is critical we stay hidden, and Mademoiselle, I appreciate your desire to know the secrets of Erik's house, but I beg you to waste no more time asking. Calm yourself, and I will calm your fiancé. Everything depends upon you retrieving that key."

"Raoul," I called, "you and Monsieur Daroga save yourselves. Erik is mad. I have escaped from his madness once before, I can do it again. There has to be a way out of there, since you got in, didn't you?"

"Listen. What the daroga says is true. I've told you, we're trapped. There's only one way out of here, and that's through the door to your room. I know you're afraid. I'm afraid, too. I don't want to die, I want to live and love you. But I will not leave, I will not retreat. You wanted me to leave last night, to surrender the field and I did. It didn't work, did it, Christine? I will do so no more."

"He'll kill you," I said. "He'll kill us all."

"More than that, perhaps," said the Persian, and Raoul answered, "What?" The two men talked for a moment, then Raoul spoke again. "If he kills us, then he kills us both, and we are together in death. Because I am not leaving you here. Either we leave together or we die together."

I heard a scrape on stone outside. "Quiet," I said frantically. "He's back."

My heart pounded so hard I scarcely heard the bedroom door open. Then what I saw filled me with horror, more than even my first glimpse of Erik's whitened corrugated head. His vest was off, his shirt was torn and pulled out of his trousers' waistband. A great stain of blood spread out over the shirt's hem. Blood dripped behind him on the brown-stained carpet. Another great smear colored his cheek and went down his neck, where he had wiped himself with his wet hand.

Not only blood spattered on the carpet. For he was wet, wet as a seal who has just slid from ocean to shore. He moved like some great sea beast as he staggered across the room, gasping and heaving. When he turned his harrowed expression towards me, pitiful and bloody and crazed, all the pent-up terror let loose inside me, and I cried out, "Erik, what happened?"

"Who knew that a drowning mouse could bite so, or fight so?" he said in an odd sing-song. "Who asked him to come down here, blustering his way in where he had no business? Erik tried to meet him last night, tried to arrange things, but no, he didn't have the time then to spare for Erik, too busy with his own affairs he was, and so Erik made plans on his own. Now he shows up, blustering and demanding, but that was his own funeral, wasn't it? That man will never knock on another door unwanted, Erik has seen to that." He had a kitchen knife in his hand and waved it around at me as he raved.

Then, as if seeing it for the first time, he grasped at his thigh and watched the blood well up through his fingers and run down his leg, mixing with the water to make a little pool on the carpet at his feet. Stumbling to the bathroom, he tied a towel around his leg. He still held the knife as he approached, and I grew green and faint as he came over to me with it extended. Swiftly he sliced through my bonds and said, "Come into the kitchen if you don't want to die buried down here."

I tried to follow him, but my arms and legs were numb and stiff as I stumbled after him. The foul, wet costume stuck to my legs. He slammed the bedroom door behind him and tracked blood and water all through the apartment, and I noticed with mad hysterical interest that none of the blood showed on the drawing room's Turkey carpet.

In the kitchen he took a little box from the pantry. "Forgive me for disturbing your wifely modesty," he said as he swiftly unbuttoned and pulled down his trousers and long undergarment. I tried not to look at his maleness that drooped so low, and instead focused on the wound on his upper thigh that still seeped blood.

It had already been stitched, but half the stitches had ripped out, and it was through this opening that the blood came. _A little blood makes a lot of stain, Lill-j__änta_, my mother used to say if I cut myself and cried at the few drops. The red-stained water from his sopping trousers collected on the floor. He took a thin belt and wrapped it around his leg, and said, "Hold this until I tell you to let it go."

"I can't, Erik," I moaned. "I will faint."

"You'll do more than that if I bleed to death," he said in a cutting voice. Then he gave me a sharp glance. "Look, you're out and free, and there's the knife on the marble over there. There's nothing I can do, so you can help me, or you can kill me."

He was so white. So after he bound his thigh above the cut and had me pull, he dug in the wound and started to stitch in the squirting, bright red blood. "Pull tighter," he gasped, and I did, not even caring that I sat between his legs. His manhood brushed my shoulder, but it was just another part of his body now like an ear or finger, as he focused on running thread through the tissue under the skin. "Now let this belt go," he said, and I did. He looked intently, but the mass of bleeding had stopped, although some still seeped from the skin where it was torn and frayed. He gasped, so pale that he did look like a skull of death.

"Get some of that wine over there and uncork it. Now, pour it on the wound. Don't be such a housewife, don't spare the floor. Just pour it, like that," and his eyes rolled back for the wine must have stung terribly. Then he pulled the gaping lips of the wound together, but they were frayed and torn where the earlier stitches had pulled through. He cursed and pulled the skin even harder so that it puckered, and he swiftly stitched the puckered edges together over the long slice that went around the inner curve of his practically fleshless thigh.

It had taken less than five minutes, and I sank to the ground, shaking. He put the bottle to his lips and took several long pulls.

I almost giggled with hysteria. Erik was drinking cooking wine. Then for the first time I noticed the smell of the lake water, which still dripped from his shirt down onto his legs and over the wound he had just stitched. It reeked like algae, or something faintly rotten.

"Erik, what happened," I said. "How did you get this?"

"Shot," he said shortly.

"Shot? By whom?"

He laughed without joy. "A poacher. At least he didn't unman me, which would have been so unfortunate for you. But never mind. There are some trousers on a peg in my room," he said. "Bring them while I bind this up." He stood shakily and headed for one of the cupboard drawers.

Into his room I ran, took the trousers, and then saw it lying on a table near the organ – a small brown leather bag that I knew contained the key that I needed. It was bound with another one of Erik's impossible knots, and my trembling fingers couldn't manage it. Take the whole bag, I told myself, and you can cut it open, or tear it. There's no time to waste.

He leaned on the door frame, glaring. "What is it you are doing in here?" he thundered, fierce, bloodstained, almost naked. I fled past him and he grasped for me but missed. I ran towards the bedroom and tore vainly at the bag with my nails as Erik limped into the room behind me, a rag wrapped around his thigh, his soaked and bloodied shirt flapping around his belly. "Give me my bag!" he screamed. "You vicious tramp, you murdering schemer!"

He seized my wrists with both hands and forced them backwards, farther, harder, until I thought they'd snap. "Drop it!" he roared, "Or I shall break them." I felt something in my wrist give way, and I screamed from the pain as the bag hit the floor. Erik pushed me into the bedside table, and the rose lamp overturned with a loud thump. Scrambling to retrieve the bag, he stood stock still as Raoul called from the other side of the wall, "Christine! Christine! Are you all right? Has he hurt you?" followed by the frantic hushing noises of the Persian.

"No!" Erik screamed, high and shrill as a woman. "It cannot be!" He ran to the corner where the hidden door sat and gave a hard smack to a brass plate that sat high up on the wall. There was the grinding of gears, something hissed like gas when you turn it on, then came the loud whoosh! of a burner being lit, and a bitter, hot smell filled the room. "Now we shall see what we've caught in the other trap!"

"Oh, God, no," I said as he advanced on me. "Let them go, please let them go." A heavy blow on the side of my head was my answer. It brought me to my knees, everything went black, and I never remembered even hitting the floor.

My poor dead husband, do you read over my shoulder from your armchair in the lounge of the communion of saints, or from your blazing bed of purgatorial fire? Do you stifle your anguish as I once stifled my laugh and probably saved my life? Can the happy dead still feel horror?

Or have you met him on the other side, heard his tale, and know already what you read here?

And you, my beautiful son, if you have found these unhappy papers, have you already risen from your seat to burn them, as your father's madness is laid before you like a table spread by a company of devils? Please don't throw this into the fire yet, for his story is not done.

(_continued._..)


	22. Screams of the Locust

**Screams of the Locust **

**A/N**_: "What they do with their bodies affects their souls" is from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, and I've borrowed it here._

It took the train an entire day to go from Brussels to Paris. From my bag I drew a magazine full of serial stories, then replaced it. No one had shared my compartment since Compiègne and so I drowsed more comfortably than when I shared it with others. Then I woke and tried to read again, but the serials themselves seemed sleepy and domestic, with errant husbands returning home or daughters fighting energetically to retain their virtue. One seemed sinister, with a mysterious lady who might have been a werewolf or vampire, but it faintly repelled me and I had no inclination to continue.

Would Jacques be there? I was almost certain he would, but this was the first time I had packed my bags, bought a ticket, climbed on board and deliberately met a man. But why? I pulled a little mirror from my bag and applied a bit of powder, then freshened my lips and cheeks with some rouge. The four years of difference in our age still weighed on me, and I wondered why he did not have a young mistress, a delicate girl of twenty from some Parisian shop or cabaret instead of a grandmother from another country. But my chin was still firm, my cheeks largely unlined. Some silver threaded through my hair, although it was hard to see against the white-gold. However, you can't hide the hands, I thought. Beneath the soft skin under the light lace gloves were a few sharp tendons, a little ropiness to the veins that hadn't been there a few years before.

I hadn't worn Raoul's ring.

Jacques had written me several times, asking me to come to Paris for a few days. Finally I agreed, trembling at the thought of Philippe and Martine's disapproval, feeling as though I had to sneak into corners and alleyways behind their back, and then a hot flame shot through me. I have nothing to hide. My hotel will be full of Englishwomen and thus it does not admit men. Jacques himself lives in a velvet monastery. If we choose to seek our own privacy, then we do. If not, then not. But Philippe doesn't enter into it.

It's not as if he's my father, and I laughed a bit bitterly to myself. Papa was more innocent than a child before his First Holy Communion. What would you think, Papa, if your little girl was en route to a rendezvous in Paris?

Professor Valerius grew so worried when you wanted to take me to the _pardons_ in Brittany on St. John's Eve, Papa. It's not fitting, he said. It's not decent. Where will you stay? She's almost a grown girl, ready to put her hair up and don long skirts. She can't show off her legs like a girl of ten anymore. You let her climb up on a table, people will look at her. Isn't that right, he asked his wife, but sweet and simple Mama Valerius just shook her head. As did Papa. Why? Papa asked. What will they look at?

Now I wonder at how simple his mind had become in those last years. Was it the tuberculosis working away at his brain? Did he not remember engendering me? Or was he one of those rare types so pure that everything to them is pure as well, those who see no blots on the world because there are so few in themselves? He held me all through the night from behind, for it was cold in a Breton barn even at midsummer, his breath soft against my neck from behind, but there was no stain in it. It was the last summer we were together, and he played his fiddle like a man possessed, as he had never played before. He was like one of those butterflies that visits as many flowers as it can, knowing that when the first frost comes it will be gone and sip nectar no more.

The swaying of the train rocked me like Papa's arms. _Lill-jänta ... lill-jänta_ the wheels said in Papa's voice as they beat in rhythm. One night a couple crept into the barn where we had just laid down for the night. They were looking for someplace quiet, and Papa didn't chase them away. He just coughed gently a few times, and they tiptoed out, whispering. Then he closed his eyes and slept.

What do you think of your little girl now, Papa?

The train pulled into the Gare du Nord station, and I almost didn't want to look around the crowded platform for fear of not seeing him. Then light from the slanting afternoon sun flashed across his spectacles, and there he was, round in a cream-colored suit, his hair like dark fire swirling around his face. He waved frantically and swam through the crowd like a sleek porpoise. He bore a few orchids tied together with some baby's breath, and before even greeting me, pinned the nosegay to my lapel. Then he couldn't embrace me for fear of crushing the flowers, and we both laughed at the same time, then together leaned over them and each other carefully. I stretched on tiptoe to navigate the curve of his body, whispering, "Thank you, Jacques." Then the flowers were forgotten as I pulled him to me and kissed him full on the mouth in the middle of the Gare du Nord station.

"You've just had a pipeful," I said afterward, breathing deeply.

"I did," he answered. "You don't mind, do you? Your train was late, and there was just enough time."

"I like it. It reminds me of wood fires, and roasting apples on a stick in the fall."

"You've done that too? I could never get mine to stay on the branch. They'd always slip off, and then I'd burn my fingers." He held me for another moment and we formed a little island as the crowds swirled around us both. "Let's get a cab. The same hotel, I take it?"

"The very same." He said nothing, and I wondered, what did he have in mind? Would he have been so bold as to find a room for us? The Unic taxi wheezed a little as we chugged along. I stopped wondering what would happen, and instead simply rested my head against his soft and comfortable shoulder, my hand under his arm warm and affectionate. The entire city around me collapsed into the perimeter of his body.

"I assume I am allowed to call?" he said as we pulled up to the modest corner building, discreet and grey as a spinster's gown.

"I can receive you in the lobby." Then I looked him frankly in the face. "I would find another hotel, but Philippe expects me to be here at the Cotillion."

"About the hotel, it isn't necessary," he said, and gently stroked my cheek. "Wherever you are content, that is where you should stay."

Still slightly defensive, I went on. "He is in Paris to make a report to the Medical Society about the woman's body they found in the Opera Garnier, the one they're calling _L'Inconnu de L'Opera_. Philippe has arranged for the burial. We are to meet after his talk at Pere Lachaise cemetery for her internment. Perhaps you would like to listen to his lecture?"

"That I might," and he looked bright, full of eagerness. "Why not you yourself?"

"I wasn't aware that women were admitted to Medical Society lectures."

"I don't know," he mused. "Perhaps they still are not. In any event, I thought your son was going to London."

"He is, shortly. But Philippe squeezes everything in, as if there were thirty hours in a day instead of twenty-four." I didn't know what to do or say after that. "It's been a long train ride," I finally remarked, watching for his reaction. "I have to freshen up." Then an impulsive thought struck me. Why should I hide from Philippe? I've had a double life once, and have no intention of repeating it. Why should I fence around any longer with Jacques? "Come with me tomorrow. You've met my son, and you've been interested in her case, the one whom they found there. Why shouldn't you come with me when she's laid to rest?"

The taxi-driver looked around inquiringly, were we getting out? "Just a minute," Jacques said, and handed the driver some franc notes. "Monsieur Doctor de Chagny might not appreciate my presence. It's not as if we were introduced under the most auspicious circumstances."

"If there were misunderstandings, we will clear them up. I'll be honest with you, Jacques. I don't want to feel I have to hide from Philippe to be friends with you."

"Of course," he said, but he looked unsure. Then he helped me out of the cab. "May I call for you later this evening?

Tired and suddenly sad, I shook my head. "Tomorrow, Jacques. Come tomorrow at 11 in the morning, and together we'll go to Pere Lachaise."

o o o o o

The day promised brightness and heat, but soon a thick fleece of cloud collected around the horizon. I had the hotel concierge telephone Philippe's club and leave a message for him to meet me at the cemetery on the far eastern side of Paris. I hated to put on the somber black, but it did not seem fitting otherwise.

The valet rang my bell shortly before eleven. Jacques was here. Nervously I smoothed my hair and adjusted my hat. When he rose to take my arm, I noticed that although the air was cool, a thin sheet of perspiration covered his brow. He wore a straw boater hat and another light linen suit with an armband of velvet black.

The driver looked inquiringly when Jacques directed him to Pere Lachaise. Because the sun hid behind clouds, we left the rear hood of the taxi down and our words almost blew away into the street.

"So," I said as soon as I was settled. "Tell me about this great conspiracy." He looked at me blankly. "You know, Jacques. The one that the _Sûreté _is supposed to be covering up. Why they had you thrown out of the Garnier. Why my son was upset with you."

He gathered himself together as if slightly shocked. "Are you sure you want me to tell you? Because I didn't think you had much interest."

I nodded, go on, and he did. "But I'm glad you brought it up, as I still find it all very curious, even though I do not wish to plague you with all my speculations. I suspect that poor unfortunate woman long ago stumbled upon something of great magnitude, back when Armand Fallières was an official in the Ministry of the Interior in the late 1870s or early 1880s. Fallières just finished his term as president without any embarrassment in that regard, and now his successor Poincaré is perfectly willing to sweep away everything that came before. Perhaps our new President fears some phantom buried under these stones by his predecessor will come back to haunt him."

I couldn't conceal my surprise. Was he playing with me? But he looked perfectly sober and sincere. "I should never have told you it was a woman," I said, trying not to let my voice waver.

"I'm glad you did, as it kept me from wandering down dead ends, but it does deepen the mystery. At first I thought the victim might have been some spy searching out what was concealed down there in the cellar depths, one who might have met his end at the hands of French military intelligence."

"Military? Jacques, why?"

He looked positively gleeful. "Remember I told you that I had written about weapons developed for the Ottomans, primitive mechanical devices that could be wound up and would operate independently under certain limited conditions? No one believed the Ottoman engineers could do it on their own, even though their own men told me to my face that they had. But that's not all, Christine. The Republic was working on something like that as well, only far more sophisticated, and the project was coordinated out of a secret office within the Ministry of the Interior. I managed to find some of those old documents from decades ago, in of all places the closed sections of the National Opera library."

"If it was closed, how did you manage to get in?"

"_Baksheesh_, Christine. Purely by the art of _baksheesh_. It's very valuable when you travel in Asia Minor."

I had heard Erik use the word before. "So you paid them to get into the library?"

"After a fashion. The clerk had a particularly troublesome situation with another man's wife that put him in dire need of quick legal assistance. In any event, the documents I was able to see before I was unceremoniously escorted out told me some interesting things. First, that such a project existed at all. Second, that there were several espionage attempts against the project during the period between 1880 and 1882, probably by agents of the British Secret Service. Then, after a successful attempt to steal secrets, the project was closed, or so it seemed. Or perhaps it was just re-opened elsewhere, under new auspices, under another name."

I sat very still. It hurt to hide so much inside, especially when it twisted through me, struggling to get out. It explains so much, I thought. So that's who paid for all those "shipments." Erik hadn't lived by _baksheesh_ alone, had he? I suppressed a tiny hysterical giggle.

He turned and our eyes met. The sun was almost overhead, but not quite, and I couldn't see his eyes in the white-hot flare reflecting outwards. But the rest of his face plainly said, You know something about this, although he was silent. Then he took my hand gently and said very low, "It's all right, Christine. I'm not fishing. When you are ready to tell me, you will."

We held hands all the rest of the way to the cemetery. As we wound around through a road inside, I saw far away the tall black figure of Philippe pacing back and forth. Silent and still stood a stooped, gnarled priest in a long black soutane. Behind him were the gravediggers smoking and resting against the cart. In this section the crosses were poor, of iron or wood or none at all. When Jacques let go of my hand, the macabre cemetery air seemed to descend on me like a weight. There had been shadows in the dark other than Erik, other than his Persian friend. And somehow a woman was entangled in it, a woman with a golden ring, a woman who was dead on the coffin cart, ready to be enfolded in the embrace of the ground.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Erik had heard Raoul and the Persian inside the strange, hot-smelling room on the other side of my bedroom wall, and had struck out against me in rage. But he must have missed his mark, for the blow dazed me for only a few seconds. When I came to my senses, he was dragging me across the floor, out of the bedroom. The burning smell was very strong.

"What's going on? Where are you taking me?" I called out. He staggered as he walked, and I saw at once why he had dragged instead of carried me. He could scarcely keep himself upright on his own legs. He left me lying in the middle of the big red and blue carpet, then sank down into his own chair and put his hands over his face.

I scrambled to my feet, and shrieked with pain as I tried to put weight unsuccessfully on my wrist.

"Let me see it," he said, pulling himself wearily up.

I pulled my wrist close to me. "I'll die before I let you touch me."

"You'll die either way," he snarled back, and seized my arm, pulling it outwards. He moved the wrist to and fro gently. "It's not broken," he announced, and wrapped it tightly with a long strip of cloth.

"If you're going to kill me, why bind it up?" I snapped.

He looked at me wildly, as if he hadn't considered that. "Let me see the other one. It's bruised," he said, and then he began to kiss my wrists over and over. "I'm sorry, so sorry, Erik doesn't mean to hurt you, but you don't learn, you don't stop, why did you try to take Erik's bag?"

"Erik," I said, trying to keep my voice under control, "I wanted to let them out. Please let them out. I'll send Raoul away if you like."

He raised his head up, his face streaked with tears. "I don't believe you," he said finally.

"Believe me or ignore me," I said. "You've already made up your mind."

Then, as if noticing for the first time, he sniffed and said, "Your dress is foul." For I still wore Marguerite's wet, stinking costume, and in shame I started to cry a little.

"Come with me," he said, lifting me to my feet from under my arms. "Into my bedroom."

I started to struggle a little, but he put his hands on either side of my face and said, "Stop it, you clawing cat. I'm going to clean you up."

"My clothes are in my bedroom," I protested.

"You aren't going in there right now. You'll have to make do with something of mine."

I had never been in the small bathroom off his bedroom, but he steered me in and pulled off the wet dress as if I were a child. I looked fearfully into his face but he showed no sign of claiming his right to my body. He handed me a rag, saying, "Wash yourself."

I did, facing away from him, shrinking with embarrassment as I rinsed with water from the sink. It took a long time as it was my right wrist that was wrapped so firmly it was immobile. He said nothing and made no move to help me. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on me every second, ready to grasp me if I made any untoward moves.

"You must be afraid I'll go for your razor," I said.

"There would be no point, as I don't shave, and thus have none." As I dried myself I felt a little sad to know why his face was always smooth. For some odd reason patches of hair grew on his body, but none on those ravaged cheeks.

Around my shoulders he put one of his embroidered silk robes. It had a warm caress of soft flannel lining. He tied it around my waist himself, as he had wrapped my hand so firmly that the fingers couldn't move. Out from under the robe he pulled my hair and arranged it around my shoulders. Then some deep emotion overcame him, for he picked up great handfuls of hair and buried his face into them, just as he was used to burying his face in my fur.

It felt so good to have the soaked, stinking costume off. He had not manhandled me when I stood naked before him, and that touched me. "Erik," I said, gently untangling the locks from his hands, "Thank you. Thank you for cleaning me up."

He gave a great cry, almost a sob, and stumbled through his bedroom now bare of all the morbid hangings and furnishings. "I meant what I said before," he choked out between sobs. "Eleven o'clock, so you have only a few hours. Why do you make Erik do this? For the first time in so long he actually wants to live, and now when that life slips away, he almost loses heart and fails in his resolve. Christine, it is you who makes me waver when I should remain strong. Because if you haven't fully chosen me in every way, including the bestowal your affection, then you and I will die. We will die together, and I won't need to enlarge the coffin, because everything around us," and he waved his arms dramatically around the room in great windmills of motion, "will become our tomb."

"If you are losing heart," I said, hoping still to talk him out of whatever madness he planned, "then why continue with these morbid thoughts?"

"Sit," he said as he smoothed a silk chair cushion and ushered me onto it. "We are like iron sharpening iron, are we not? We are of equal hardness, and who would have thought that such a soft beautiful woman with hair like spun silk would have such icy steel within? I was like one dead for so many years, and then I heard you, and saw you with your hair all silver in the limelight. I don't know why the lighting man picked that filter that evening, it made no sense for a peasant wedding to be lit in such cold silver-blue white. Yet it made your hair look like spun glass as you danced." He sobbed softly, "Christine, I don't want you to die."

"Then don't kill me," I said just as quietly.

Instead of answering, he curled at my feet, holding onto my sprained wrist with both hands, his tears soaking the cloth wrap. We sat there like that for a long time, and the hot burning smell grew stronger as it slowly penetrated the room. "What is that?" I asked, alarmed. "Is there a fire on the other side of the wall?"

"It's the heat of the jungle," he said, shaking his head as if coming back from far away. "Don't mind it. It won't reach us in here. Did you know that at the top of the highest mountain in Africa there is a gigantic nest, and in it the phoenix settles every thousand years, bursting into flame? The little new phoenix emerges from the ashes, but one time, the time will come when a fledgling doesn't come forth. All there will be is fire, then ash, and with no new phoenix, that will signify the end of everything. It will be the end of the world," and he began humming the Dies Irae, "earth be all by fire consumed..."

As if reminded of something, he got up and went into his bedroom. Immediately I flew to the door of my own room, but found that he had locked it from the outside. The door itself felt warm. I bent down to the crack at the bottom, and the air coming out felt far hotter than usual.

He came back carrying two small objects. "Get up," he said. "You can't get back in there to your lover unless I let you."

With a small key he opened the new ebony box that had been fitted onto the mantelpiece. It swung open from the front rather than the top. The white enamelled inside had been divided into two sections by the same gleaming black wood that made up the outside. Each compartment held something that looked like a brass gas fixture before the knob to turn it had been put on. He flipped the top over, so that the inside was exposed and we could look straight in.

"Come here, Christine, and see what I have for you. Think of it as a delayed wedding present, if you will."

The walk across that living room seemed to take a whole day, because so much dread weighed down on my shoulders. It was some kind of device, but what?

"Take these," he said. "Look at them. Get to know them well, because they are the harbingers of your fate."

Into my hands he thrust two small metal figures, which at first in confusion I thought were toys. They were two little creatures made of bronze, the first a scorpion with tail erect and ready to strike, the second a locust with its long jumping legs. There was something odd about it, and I held the jumping insect closer to the lamp to see better. Then I almost cried out, for instead of the wide eyes and narrow jaws of an insect, it had a human face with its mouth open in a kind of scream. Hair streamed behind its head and met up with its flared-open wings. It was a horrible thing, hideous, and I didn't want to touch it.

"Aren't they pretty little creatures?" Erik said. "I had them cast especially for you. This is the key you were looking for, isn't it?" and he waved the small key at me, the one he had used to open the ebony box. "What a coincidence, that it happens to be same one which opens the second door in your room. It has a poetic compactness about it, wouldn't you say? Efficient, meaningful ... never mind. Let's stick to the point at hand."

He pointed to the fixtures inside the box. "This is where they go," and he took them from me. He screwed the scorpion onto one, and the scream-headed locust onto the other.

"What are they for?" I asked, hating to hear the answer, fearing something devilish of Erik's devising.

"Think of them as outward and visible signs of your inward spiritual disposition, Christine, as sacraments of realization. But unlike the sacraments provided by the Church, which give no indication of the supposed reality beneath their mundane exteriors, my sacraments really do something. You won't have to wait for heaven to see their effects. Let's just say that I believe in grace made manifest," and he laughed at some inner joke. "One is the sacrament of life, the other of death. Curiously, both use the same matter, this fine cast bronze..."

"Stop it!" and I kicked at the fireplace tools in anger, making them shimmer and ring. "Just say what you mean plain out, and stop mocking!"

"Very well," he hissed, and I drew back, a little afraid. When Erik worked himself into a fever pitch like this, he hated to be interrupted. "I'll put it plainly, in words you can understand with no effort of thought whatever. By eleven o'clock tonight you must turn one or the other of these fixtures. They will turn all the way around into the upside-down position. Turn the scorpion, and I will know that you have accepted me entirely, will live as my wife, love me in all ways, and be true to me. Turn the grasshopper, and both you and I will die and lie together forever at the bottom of this giant mausoleum. Is that simple enough for you?"

"Why?" I asked. "What's wrong with a simple yes or no?"

"Why should bread become flesh, or wine become blood? Isn't it enough that rational words should be laid out in black and white on sober white paper? No, it's not enough, my loving wife. I want to see your small fair hand wrapped around the brass creature, and then I want to see you physically turn it. I want to feel the consequences of your refusal in the last few seconds that will remain to both of us. You will take one of these animals in your hand, or the other, and you will with your own action decide our fate. Not just your fate, but both our fates. And it will come not only from your will, Christine, but from your body as well. For just as if you choose to live you will also choose to love me with your body as well as your will, because your choice will have turned your soul to me finally, and what we do with our bodies affects our souls."

I looked long at the little bronze figures in the box. They seemed old, the metal burnished and dark. "I can't believe these are new," I muttered.

"Too much shininess would spoil the effect. I had them soaked in a little vinegar and aged."

"What will happen," I hesitated, "if I turn the locust?"

I thought he would rage at my words. Instead he sighed and sadness weighed down his face. "Then we both die at once, in a flash."

"Together?"

"Together. In an instant."

"How is that possible, that we could both die in the same moment?" For I imagined him first strangling me, then hanging himself.

"Turn the grasshopper and find out. Go, walk over there right now, and do it. When you ask a question, don't frown like that, as if you didn't want the answer. There is the box of ebony, there sits the little creature just waiting for your caress, and I beseech you, satisfy your curiosity and end my torment."

Infuriated, I cried, "Turn it yourself, then! I won't do it! Whatever devil's game you're playing, play it by yourself!" He gaped at me. Heartened, I went on, "Let Raoul and your Persian friend out of the trap, and I'll think about it. But I won't make a single move as long as they are both in there."

"Little cat, put away your claws. Do you think you can make bargains with me?" He limped into the kitchen and I followed. From his wine room he brought out a bottle which he cradled lovingly. "Eighteen-hundred and sixty-three," he said. "I purchased this Cheval Blanc when I first obtained Hausmann's contract to drain this fetid swamp on which we sit. What a price I paid for it, too. I thought I would let it fatten for twenty years before decanting it. But it didn't make it quite to age twenty, did it?" He waved the bottle at me recklessly, swinging it around, and it looked as if it were a bottle filled with dark clotted blood. "Will you have some, dear wife? It's just a few years younger than you, if you can imagine that."

I shook my head, quivering now with anger and fear.

"Never mind," he said. "You never showed that much partiality to wine, did you?" He uncorked the bottle and poured the contents into a carafe, and a dark rich smell swirled up. "You have to try this, Christine, never in your life will you experience such again. I can't imagine your sailor setting something like this before you. There are scraggly little climbing roses that scrabble up the wall, and then there is the bush in full flower, with blossoms wide as a child's face, and this is the fairest and most fragrant among all of them. Come, you'll have a taste anyway," and he set out two glasses.

I glared at him, saying nothing.

"Of course," he said, "you don't want to buy anything sight unseen, do you? Like men who hide their faces." With humorless laughter he poured some into a glass, swirled it, and tasted. His eyes closed, and he leaned his poor head back with a sigh. "I think it will meet with your approval," and he poured for both of us.

We sat in front of the fire and after the first refined, sampling sips, he downed one glass after another as I stared into the ruby pool in mine. You couldn't just swallow this wine to wash down bread or meat. It had a life of its own. Strong, compelling, it demanded all your attention. I didn't like it. After so many years in Paris, I still didn't care what I drank, as long as it wasn't bitter or sour.

"Is this supposed to be a fine wine?" I asked.

"Little ingenue, must I teach you everything? I see by your face that it's not to your liking. Never mind, in the few hours remaining to us, there's no point in trying to gild the lily of your ignorance any longer. I admit, I would have liked it a little fuller and heavier on the tongue, but a year or two more wouldn't have made that much difference anyway. Not that it will matter when that clock on the mantelpiece strikes eleven."

One tick of the passage of time merged into another. I happened to glance over at the scorpion and grasshopper sitting quietly in their box, and they glittered in the lamplight. Erik poured the final drops from the carafe into his glass, and looked critically at mine. I handed it to him silently, and he drank that, too, spilling some onto the front of his bloody, damp shirt. Blearily he looked at me and brushed at the stains, laughing a little.

Perhaps he'll go to sleep, I thought. Then I can get at that key.

But he didn't sleep. He grasped his leg and mumbled to himself, "It eases the throbbing, but what's the point, the worst sewer swill from the cafe on the corner would have done that just as well," and rolled from side to side in his chair. He closed his eyes but whenever I moved opened them wide and fixed those great black and gold orbs on me. "Time's wasting," he said at one point, slurring.

So I shut my eyes instead, and when I opened them again he was gone. In panic I leapt up, looking around wildly. His bedroom door was closed, and I could hear him inside, rummaging around and talking to himself, talking to "Erik," as if someone else were there. Then, most amazing, I saw that the door to my room was open.

Hesitantly I crept in, fearing what I should see. The air inside was warm, and when I crept over to the wall where the locked secret door stood, I cried out when I touched it, for the door was hot.

"Mademoiselle Daae?" came the Daroga's voice, harsh and raspy.

"Wait," I said. The cushioned, stinking chair had the scarves still tied to it. I dragged it over to the bedroom door and wedged it in front of it. It would not keep Erik out should he want to come in, but it would perhaps delay him a moment or so. "Yes, I'm here now."

Then we started speaking together, at once, and after a moment Raoul's voice came across too. "Slow down," the Daroga said. "One at a time. Mademoiselle, where is Erik?"

"He's in his room, doing I don't know what. He was raving, furious, and then he drank. I thought he would close his eyes but he stayed awake until I fell asleep, and I had almost no wine at all. Raoul, he's lost his mind. He has some kind of device on the mantel, and he screwed these little brass handles onto it. They're like little metal animals, a scorpion and then one like a locust, but it's horrible." Then I went on to recount Erik's ultimatum. "He says he'll kill us both instantly if I refuse him. But he's mad, how can he do that?"

"Listen to me," the Daroga said. "You too, Vicomte."

"We've found a cache of gunpowder, Christine," Raoul interrupted. "Please, you must try to get us out of here. We are almost perishing from thirst."

A sick fear seized me. "Raoul, I can't, I've tried. He keeps the key too close, and he almost broke my wrist when I tried to get it."

"No!" Raoul said, and the Persian tried to quiet him, but it was no use.

"So," I went on, "I have until eleven o'clock to accept or refuse him."

"Christine," Raoul said, "for the love of God, tell us, what time is it? You have to listen, there's something here that's terrifying."

"What? Oh, no, what? I can't bear anymore of this."

"This gunpowder," the Daroga broke in. "I tried to tell you. It lies beneath this torture chamber in which we have been imprisoned."

"Torture?" I interrupted. "What torture? Oh, that fiend, how could he do that to you? To you both? Is that why the wall and this room are so hot? Are you roasting now?"

"The room is cooling," the Persian answered. "I think that when we found the door which led to the gunpowder cache, it set up some automatic mechanism which switched off the burner. It's dark in here now, almost too dark to see, but I am reassured, because it is far better than that burning horror of desert sun."

"The gas," I murmured. "I heard it go on, and now it's off."

"And it did its work," he answered. "Erik is efficient. He replicated his Golestan creation perfectly."

"Not that we wanted to properly experience it," Raoul broke in. "But the time, Christine, I beg you, what is the time?"

A little Ormulu clock ticked on my bureau. "Ten fifty," I said, and Raoul gave a loud cry.

"So let me understand this," the Persian said calmly as if Raoul had not uttered anything at all, "the fiend wants you to tell him that in a few minutes you'll marry him, and you are to turn some kind of switch or fixture to signify that?"

"Yes," I said. "A scorpion for yes, a locust for no. He fitted them into a box on his mantelpiece, but it looked like there were some kind of pipes or tubes coming out of it."

"Oh, mercy of Allah," the Persian replied, and when I heard the fear in his voice I started to tremble too. "You know what this means, Vicomte? You shake your head, but use it, rather than just wagging it. Underneath us are many barrels, and wires, and a kind of burner apparatus nearby. No, Vicomte, I am not mad. Erik has created some kind of mechanism to ignite this entire cache, and what will set it off, Mademoiselle, will be your small hand should you refuse him."

Raoul said something inaudible.

"Yes, he would do that, for I have seen Erik in love, and this time he will not let it slip from his grasp as he did so many decades ago, even if he can only take her with him in death."

"What is he going to do, Daroga? Raoul, what is happening?"

"It is simple," Raoul said, "although I do not want to believe it myself. When you turn the locust, thus refusing Erik's hand in marriage, it will light a flame, ignite some wadding of some kind, and thus blow the gunpowder. This entire building will go up in a massive explosion." He said it with deadly calm, but his voice shook.

"Impossible," I said. "How could he build something like that?"

"You have seen what he has made," the Persian said. "You have seen men walk and turn corners on their own accord. In Persia Erik and I would talk about such things as if they were only dreams, but in Constantinople dreams became reality, and he has improved them since. I am convinced if he sets his mind to it he can build almost anything, including this elaborate device that will kill us all."

"So this is what he meant, when he said to me that 'there will be a rent in the fabric of humanity,' things like that. He said we would die together, in a flash."

Raoul must have pounded on the door in fury, for the Daroga said, "Stop, don't lose your head, man. You kept yourself together during the terrible heat, compose yourself now. We can't get out that way."

Raoul said, "Daroga, there is something else. Is there a performance tonight? Oh, I wish I knew with certainty what night it even was."

I broke in. "If it is the next night after _Faust_, then there will be a performance of Meyerbeer. That famous one ... _Robert de Diable_. If it's the second night after, I think it will be _L'Africaine_."

The two men talked quietly together. "Yes," the Daroga said. "I see, but it grieves my heart... however, there can't be much time. Only a few minutes, perhaps."

"Oh, please let me think a moment," Raoul said, cutting him off. I could feel my heart pounding under Erik's robe. Then Raoul spoke in calmer tones, "Daroga, please let me talk to Christine in peace. No, my head is quite clear now, I assure you."

Through the fog of my heart-sickness and the barrier of the wall came Raoul's voice, strong now and composed, and in my mind he appeared larger and firmer of purpose than he had ever been. No more was he the boy, no more the tender-skinned, soft-caressing lover whose breast I held on the roof of the Opera. Instead I heard the man in the blue uniform who ruled men on board ship, not by force or threats but by quiet command.

"You must choose the scorpion," Raoul said. "Lives are at stake. You must."

"What?" I almost shrieked. "You can't mean that!"

"Christine, think. If you refuse him, it's not just us. It's hundreds of people. You know what theater fires are like, and this would be worse. This could bring the whole building down into rubble."

"I'm not a soldier," I answered. "You're the officer who can lie down and die for your duty. I can't."

"You can," he said quietly.

"Do you understand to what hell you condemn me? You would give me to him, just like that?" Then a horrible thought crossed my mind. "You must fear for yourself. Is this your way to use me to save your own life?"

"Of course I want to live," he said rapidly. "I won't lie. But even if I had died in the torture chamber, I would still want you to do this. Don't think about me. There are five hundred lives above us, maybe a thousand. Have you ever seen someone burned all over his body? I have. One time a boiler on board blew, and the engineers were roasted. The men who died at once experienced a great mercy. The others ... You heard the Daroga. There's gunpowder down here, and some kind of wiring, a mechanism for setting it all off. He's going to not only kill you and kill himself. If you refuse him, the whole building's going to blow."

I felt myself grow cold and far away. "An army of fire giants to bring down Valhalla, that's what he said. It made no sense, but now it does."

"He did not do this on a whim," the Persian said. "This was planned for some time."

Raoul spoke so softly I could barely hear him, and I pressed my head up against the door even though it was painfully hot against my ear. "You have to turn the scorpion. If you live, you may yet escape. If I live, I will search in every corner of the world until I find you again. But if you refuse him, none of those above will have any chance of escape, including you, or me."

"If I live I will never escape him," I said, flooded with shame that I had accepted Erik's ring, accepted his body inside mine, thinking of his horrible skin, of his presence around me, filling me, suffusing me, never letting me go, inside and over and around me forever.

"You can, and you will," Raoul went on. "No one will blame you. You were forced."

"You aren't forced, are you?" came Erik's voice from behind me. "Who's forcing you?" and I jumped and knocked over a nearby water pitcher on a stand. It fell onto the stone floor where the rug did not reach, and broke into long sharp shards.

He repeated his ultimatum, and from behind the wall I heard the sharp voice of the Persian, arguing, pleading, and another murmuring lower down.

"Where's Raoul," I called to the Persian. "What's he saying?"

"He prays," came the answer. "With his glass beads he prays to Isa's pure mother Maryam, and begs of her that you will do the will of Allah without fear."

I looked at the pottery shards on the floor and thought, I could pick one up and put it in my sleeve, go turn the scorpion, and afterwards cut my throat. Then despair overtook me, because Raoul and the daroga were still locked in the torture chamber, and nothing was to stop Erik from turning it back on and killing them.

"Let them out," I whispered. "Please let them out first."

"I will not," he said. He had changed his clothes, and his vest was scarlet under his black jacket. As he paced back and forth, he dragged his leg a little. "Never," he said through clenched teeth. "Decide."

As if in a dream, I brushed past him. I walked over to the mantel and put my hands on both metal creatures, not thinking but just staring at them. The screaming face on the locust looked like Erik's. The scorpion had no face at all, just little clots of bronze for eyes. Life, or death. My death for their lives, all of their lives.

I don't want to hope, I thought. I can't do this and still have hope that someday, over the hill, will come the rescue party. If I do this, then I die. Not in the body, but in everything I was and everything I am. I will become his creature totally, and who knows, maybe he is right? Maybe I will indeed learn to love him. Perhaps my flesh will burgeon under him, and if I am indeed locked away, when he does summon me I will adorn myself and go to him gladly. All this could happen.

It will be like dying, I thought, because I will not recognize myself.

Every time I thought something would kill me, break me in two, it did not. First there was Mother's death, and the loss of the farm. But I bore it, and it was beautiful later in its own way, a fairy-tale existence, and I had Papa all to myself. Then when we moved to Paris, I thought I would die again. I didn't want to come to this big smelly city and have to talk in a strange language which I'd only studied from books. Then Paris opened as a crack in the magic mountain, to show all kinds of wonders within.

When Papa died, that was the worst of all, because nothing made sense or mattered to me anymore. But I didn't die. Instead, I went to the conservatory and sang not for Papa alone, or the faceless crowds at the _pardons_, but for those teachers who took my voice apart and put it together again as Erik made his automata. I became their automaton, their little wind-up canary, but there was some pride in that even if there was no zest in it.

Then one day, someone came to ignite the spark of joy, and that well-crafted mechanism of song glowed with the life of an infused soul.

I turned to him, tall, pacing, wringing his hands, muttering to himself and said, "Erik, I want to know something before I choose."

He sighed and said, "More bargaining? There is the grasshopper, just turn it. Here, give stand aside and I'll do it for you if you've lost your nerve," but as he reached for it I blocked his hand with mine.

"You say you want me to be your 'living wife.' What if I don't sing for you again? Would you still want me then?"

He laughed, so unusual because this time there was genuine humor in it. "That wasn't meant to amuse you," I frowned.

"What does singing have to do with the love of a real wife? Millions of men across the globe have wives who do not sing. Sing all you wish, Christine, or never utter a note again if that is your desire, although I do not think you can keep silent very long. You never manage to in any other regard. Sing?" and he laughed again, then grew suddenly very serious. "I want you to love me. I want you to stop being cold to me. But you cannot, can you?" He reached again to touch the locust. "I will do it myself. It is too much to lay upon your shoulders."

My hands started to shake and I gripped the little metal creatures convulsively. The little wind-up bird felt something stir inside of her, something of her own.

"So it is truly me that you love. Not the hair, not the costumes, not the applause, not the voice."

He stood to my side, the etched pits and crevasses of his face twisted even deeper with emotion. "It was always so," he whispered. "From the very start. Had you any doubt?"

That makes it possible, I thought. Perhaps in this new life I can actually live, rather than despair. Few women are loved like this. But I cannot do this with hope. There has to be none. I must extinguish it. Raoul, forgive me.

I pulled the locust from its fitting and threw it into the fireplace. Then I turned the scorpion. Erik gave a loud cry, and I looked at him in horror because he himself was so surprised. Then I knew. He had expected me to turn the grasshopper and call down fire from Muspelheim on us all. He had expected, no, had wanted to die. He wanted to use me to die. Now he had to live. We stared at each other like two damned souls shipwrecked on the shores of hell.

A great rumbling filled the room, a rush and roar of water, as if Acheron itself overflowed its great banks and ran through the bowels of the Garnier Opera. I thought I heard faint cries from within, and said in fury, "Oh, you are impossible. Did you just callously lie to me? Are you going to drown instead of roast them? Do you plan to kill them anyway?"

"The water has to get to a certain level to disable the mechanism," he said, and as we waited I bit the inside of my mouth, trying to avoid flying at him in a turmoil of fear and distrust. Then silently he turned the scorpion fixture back to its original position. Slowly the sound of water receded. "It is done," he said.

"The opera is safe," I said, hoping it were true. "But if you kill them, I will not be your wife as you want."

"Renege on your promise, and they both die."

We stood there unmoving, staring at each other, horns locked in a battle of wills. "So when will you let them out?"

"After you dress. I can't have my wife showing herself in her bathrobe."

"I need to clean myself up as well. Please turn on the water in the tub."

"You won't try anything, will you? Because you promised," and he sounded like a petulant little boy arguing with a schoolmate.

"No," I said. "I won't try to kill myself. You'll have a living woman to parade in front of Paris or take to Asia Minor if you wish, not a corpse. That was part of the bargain. Now how about your part?"

He snorted as if in disgust, and while I ran the bath, he cleaned up the broken pitcher. "Time to spring the mice from the trap," he said.

"Wait!" I called. "Don't you have to let them in through this door, the one that's locked?"

He laughed. "There are six walls, and a top and a bottom to that cell in the honeycomb, and each is its own door. I can let them in or out any way that I please. As if I would lead them through your bedroom, indeed," and out he went.

"Raoul!" I called as soon as he shut the door. "Raoul, Daroga, he says he's coming to get you! I turned the scorpion."

"Oh, God, Christine, you don't know how hard it was to breathe there, thinking that we would go up in smoke."

"Daroga, will he keep his promise?"

"I pray he will."

"Christine, I love you. I swear to you, I will find you and bring you back."

"I love you too," and a great well of sorrow opened up in me. "But you have to forget me, Raoul. You'll never get me back, he'll hide me in Turkey, or Morocco, or Algeria, any of those places ... and it will kill me to hope, day after day, waiting for you. I can't. Take my love, but forget me. I can't live otherwise."

"No, I won't believe that. You're terrified and you have had a terrible shock. Don't lose heart now. I will find you!"

"Quiet," the Persian barked. "He comes!"

There was a loud sliding scrape. Erik spoke, although I couldn't understand him, and then he laughed. A few loud cries of alarm, and there was one gentle thud like the sound a large sack of laundry makes when it falls over, then another. There were no sounds of struggle. I climbed on a chair to peek through the little window at the top of the hidden door, but the torture room was deep in darkness and I could see nothing.

I truly was Erik's now. I bathed, blushing at the memory of my last soak in that tub, wondering how I would feel the next time Erik climbed on me in some strange bed, in some city I could not imagine.

After emerging from the the bathroom I searched through the wardrobe. There was a cream-colored blend of wool and silk, soft as an angel's sleeve. I'll never want for lovely clothes, I thought as I put it on.

My bedroom door was unlocked, and asleep or unconscious on the sofas were Raoul and the Persian, while standing by the fire warming himself was my husband.

Never had I known such control, not even when turning that hated dial to release the cooling flood into the chamber of fire. Every impulse spurred me to rush to Raoul's side, while to do so would have courted instant death. The gunpowder was ruined, but it took no "little bag of life and death" for Erik to strangle or stab us in that very room.

The Persian began to stir. Erik turned around and I gave a little cry of shock. He wore a black silk mask like the one I'd thrown into the fire. It wasn't for me, I knew at once. He wanted to hide his shame from the men, yet I couldn't help but stare. I was used to his bitter face, not this blank impassive black. Through the eye holes he fixed me with a bronze glance, hard and shiny.

"The Persian will wake soon," Erik said, "but you are to say nothing to him, not a word. You are under a vow of silence now, until I can determine that you will be true to your promise."

Finally the tall brown man shook himself and opened his long lovely eyes. I brought him some tea but ignored him when he tried to speak to me. He gestured at Raoul and said to Erik, "Monsieur le Vicomte, does he live?"

"He does," Erik said gravely as he turned to the fire, staring into it. I didn't see the little screaming locust; perhaps it had melted, or he had already fetched it out. The scorpion remained in the box, right-side up now, its tail still ready to strike.

"You can't keep him, Erik, you know that. I hold you to that promise. You must let him go."

"In awhile," Erik replied like a little child told to release the puppy before he hurt it. "He will sleep for hours."

"And Mademoiselle Daae? What will become of her now?"

I tried to not look over when I heard my name. Instead, I sat pretending to read while the two men talked.

"Such a foolish question," Erik answered. "She becomes my wife in every way, body and soul." He noticed the Persian looking around and said, "You like my rooms?"

"Your mother's furniture goes well here. It is a shame I had to visit you under such inauspicious circumstances. You should have invited me sooner, Erik."

"No doubt. I don't know why you're so ungrateful, though, as I've told you that all this furniture is yours to take with you, if you wish. Or burn it, I don't care. It will be a shame to leave it all, though."

"Then don't. No one is forcing you to leave Paris."

Erik answered, "What, and live with my beautiful bride down here, like a rat in the sewer? What kind of life is that for a man or for his family?" and at the word "family" a little pang went through me. "This is why I have never invited you to visit me in Paris, as you can't refrain from telling other people how to run their affairs."

"I only interfere for your sake, Erik. Seriously, why should you leave Paris? Where would you go?"

"Very clever you think you are. What makes you think I would even tell you the truth?"

"Erik, the _andarun_ is no place for her. She'll wither and die." The Persian spoke low and impassioned, trying not to let me hear.

"Or perhaps free of all this harassment and worry, she'll get her pretty color back and flourish. But your cup is empty, and there is more in the kitchen. No, Christine, keep reading as you are. I'm perfectly capable of pouring out for our guest."

Stretched on the couch, Raoul began to lightly snore.

Erik brought the Persian another cup of tea from the kitchen, and this one must have been drugged, for while the two men continued to spar back and forth, gradually the Persian's voice grew slurred and he laughed a little. Then he leaned his head back and while his eyes remained open, he slumped back and stared up at the ceiling with a glazed and vacant expression.

"I have to deliver a package," Erik told me. "Don't bother trying to escape with your young man; he will neither hear, nor speak, nor move for many hours. And don't try to shake or rouse him, either, as unfortunately people under the influence of that particular _pharmakon _have been known to stop breathing or lose their heartbeats. It would be a shame to go through all the trouble of saving him, just to kill him."

Then he strode over to the Daroga, and put his arm around the dazed man's shoulders. He leaned very close to him, with his mouth almost directly on his ear. "Get up," he said, and I almost thought I heard him address the Persian by name, although I could not hear it clearly. Slowly the daroga staggered to his feet as if hypnotized.

"Where's his cloak?" Erik said to himself, then muttered, "If it's back in the torture chamber, he can do without it." Then he gripped the Persian firmly by the arm and walked him out of the room, the big brown man compliant and obedient as a child, as stunned as a sleepwalker.

The outer door locks all clicked shut, and I stared forlornly at Raoul. Erik might have been lying when he said Raoul's breathing would stop if I shook him, but then again, he might have been telling the truth. So I put my face next to his ear and called loudly over and over, "Raoul, wake up," but nothing happened. Nor did I dare hold his hand or weep on his breast.

An hour or so later Erik returned, and when he went to pick up Raoul as well, I cried, "Where are you taking him? You promised you would let him go. You promised," and he flinched as if the word "promise" was a blow under which he shuddered.

"He's a hostage," he replied.

"So you don't trust me?" I asked.

"You haven't exactly shown yourself worthy of trust, dearest wife," he said. "I'll keep him safe and check on him."

"You're taking him to the Communard jail, aren't you?" and he nodded, silent. Then horror more desperate than any so far washed over me. I had been to those prison cells underneath the Opera and knew there were more chambers than rooms in a rabbit warren. Raoul could disappear down there forever; he could scream his lungs raw and no one would hear him. The injustice and travesty of it all overwhelmed me, and I shouted, "You said you would let him go. You can't keep him a prisoner."

"Do you swear on your soul to be my living wife?" he asked.

Confused, I said, "I already promised you I wouldn't kill myself."

"It's undignified for a man to argue with his bride," he said, and he sounded almost reasonable. "I expect you to be my wife in every way," and he staggered a little as if dizzy, almost falling on the sofa next to Raoul. "Why can't you love me?" he said, almost to himself. "Why can't you love me?" and he began to cry a little, then recovered himself. "Never mind, he can't stay here. Erik wants to be alone with his wife," still talking half to himself.

"Why don't you make him walk, like you did the Persian?"

"Ah, but to do that I would first have to wake him up, and then he would see you, and Erik can't have that."

"You can't carry him," I stated. "You'll stumble or drop him. You'll break open those stitches again, and start to bleed."

"How kind of you to show such concern for Erik's welfare. Never for a moment have I doubted your selfless devotion. Very well. Go into your bedroom and I will lock the door. Not a word or a cry out of you," and he placed his hands almost tenderly around Raoul's throat, "or his life will be gone in an instant. You are to remain utterly silent. Can you do that?"

I nodded, and when I heard the lock click, I pressed my ear up against the door as hard as I could. A short while later I heard Raoul's voice, thick and slurred as if he had been drinking all night, and Erik in return soothing him in tones like liquid silk. "She's here, she's fine, no, of course I have not harmed her, here, drink this, ah yes. All down, that's right. What a good boy you are. No, you can't see her now, she's sleeping. All this excitement, and she needs her rest. You've had a nice rest, haven't you? See how much better you feel?" and Raoul began to laugh, a high boyish giggle.

Then Erik gave a gasp, or grunt. "You weigh almost as much as that miserable Persian," he said. "Come on, you walk on your own. Yes, like that." I opened my door a crack and watched Raoul move slowly, unseeing although his vacant eyes were open. Erik put his arm around his shoulders and pulled Raoul's body to his own, to support him further. Even though Raoul walked on his own, Erik still staggered a little as the two of them disappeared out the front door.

(_continued._..)


	23. Tenderness

**Tenderness**

As our taxicab puttered through the Père Lachaise cemetery, a sick feeling of dread washed over me. Père Lachaise was like a small city, almost toy-sized, like one of the miniature towns Philippe and Louvel used to construct from blocks on a spread-out colored counterpane. Inside little tombs like houses the dead slept, and there were even neighborhoods – the homes of the rich were set inside wide parks or on broad tree-lined avenues, while the homes of the poor were jumbled together in narrow by-ways, and some of the stone tombs were even crumbling. I looked away for fear I would see a hand or foot emerge from a toppling pile of stone.

All the tombs were smaller than a house, far smaller, and at any minute I expected their carved doors to open and little wizened people, brown and bony, to dart out and run into their neighbor's house, or stroll arm in arm down the miniature streets.

"You look pale, Christine," Jacques said, squinting through his glasses. Then to the cabdriver he called out, "Just park the car, my man, there's no need to circle a dozen times." He took me gently by the arm. "Are you sure you have the strength for this? Because if you feel ill or faint, there's no reason to go on."

Philippe had seen our taxi pull up, and already was striding over on long swift legs. "Jacques, I'll be fine." As I drew from my reticule a little bottle of smelling salts, Philippe pulled the cab door open a little too hard, and the frame shook.

"Mother, what's this?" he said, not looking at Jacques. "_Sal volatile_?" He wrinkled his nose at the pungent combination of ammonia and lavender.

"Don't fuss, Philippe, I'm fine," I said. Jacques had already exited the taxi, and for a moment the two men bumped into each other as both tried to help me emerge. "Stand back, both of you, or you shall knock me onto the pavement!" I looked over Jacques's wide shoulder, and the little old priest, I saw with irritation, was trying to keep from laughing. "You act as if I were Methuselah's grandmother," I said in irritation, and flung myself out of the taxi, almost dislodging my hat in the process.

The two men stared at each other, and Philippe let out a long held-in sigh. "You," he said coldly to Jacques. "Of all people whom I never expected, and never wanted to see again."

"Philippe," I began, but Jacques waved me off.

"Monsieur Doctor de Chagny," he said, and thrust out his hand to Philippe, who stared at it as if a brown bear from the Paris Zoo had done the same. "Madame de Chagny invited me to accompany her to the interment of the unfortunate girl all of Paris now calls 'The Unknown of the Opera.' We have had our misunderstandings, my good doctor. We have expressed our differences and disagreements, and I am hopeful that now we may re-introduce ourselves basking in the grace of this lovely lady."

"Don't flatter me or my mother," Philippe said, darting a hostile glance in my direction. "Mother, why did you bring him here? He has interfered in our forensic investigations, and tomorrow's fish-wrap will have some popularization with his name on it, making a mockery of what we do both in the laboratory and here today."

"Indeed!" Jacques said, pulling his waistcoat around his stomach. "I make no mockery, monsieur."

"You have an article?" I said, staring at him. "On what?"

"On the revolutionary new techniques in medical science that will make the flight and concealment of criminals a thing of the past."

Philippe gave a little snort. "Vulgar sensationalism."

"Philippe," I said, using the same sharp voice that got his attention when he was a gangly youth grown too tall too fast for his legs to carry him gracefully, and no longer wanted to listen to a meddlesome female. "Stop it. We're here for a burial," and as if on cue, the priest shuffled forward.

He put one hand on Jacques's shoulder and another on Philippe's arm. The hand that rested on Philippe was weathered, the arm twisted within the black broadcloth of his worn _soutane_, and I wondered that he was able to serve at the Holy Sacrifice. Priests must be able to hold the Host in both hands, with both arms upraised during the Mass. His almost-bald head was covered with brown age spots, and his face sagged into a loose bag of wrinkles. But he had kind eyes, bright despite his advanced age.

"My son has forgotten his manners," I said. "I'm Madame de Chagny, and I do not believe we have been introduced, my Father."

"Father Durant," he said, and bowed a little, just a slight nod of the head.

"You know this place well, I've heard," I answered.

"I laid my first soul to rest here in 1861."

"You've served long in the vineyard," Jacques remarked, and Philippe shifted in impatience, but said nothing.

The old priest just bowed a little again and smiled. Then he pulled the two men gently towards the empty vault that lay gaping as a wound amidst the small and poor sarcophagi in the low-rent district of the Père Lachaise necropolis.

In a voice only slightly quavering with age, he chanted the _Deus, cujus miseratióne ánimæ fidélium requiéscunt _as he shook hyssop soaked with holy water over the crypt's yawning black opening. He sprinkled with his intact left hand, staring ahead as if lost in his own voice. He did not chant, but instead sang in beautiful tones which pulled at me from the inside. He had no boy to assist him and so Philippe held the bowl. Sonorously, hypnotically, the voice lifted, then fell, caressed the ear while cooling it at the same time. Philippe stopped glaring over at Jacques, and Jacques stopped sneaking looks at his pocket watch. Where had the old priest learned to sing like that?

The cemetery men removed their hats and brought forward the simple wooden coffin. Fr. Durant raised his mangled right hand and arm in the sign of the cross over her remains, that poor unknown girl found in a shallow grave beneath the Palais Garnier. Had they sewn her back together after looking through her body? Did she reek of preservatives, and would they keep her as a kind of secular "incorruptible?" I hoped they had buried her with her ring. Something made me think of Isabeau, so small at age six in her tiny coffin, and then Martine's pinched, bitter face came to mind. She wouldn't approve of this burial. I could hear her in my thoughts. _What if she had been a suicide? What if she hadn't died in the graces of the Church?_ At once it washed over me, I wish so badly that Isabeau would have lived. She would have been a beautiful woman, tender and kind. And I began to cry.

The old priest looked up briefly but went on. In Latin he sang, "Grant her eternal rest, O Lord," and dutifully we answered, "And let light perpetual shine upon her." The stone lid scraped over the top, that old familiar sound of stone on stone, and after the last "Amen," I took a step forward, breathed in deeply, and out of me poured the _Regina Coeli_, the ancient hymn to the Queen of Heaven.

Everyone stared, but Father Durant put his mangled hand to his withered old chest and gasped out loud. Tears stood in his eyes. The grave-men had departed with their cart, and no one heard them go. Then the priest looked at me and his eyes were like the black holes that men opened in the earth or stone in which to place the fragile bodies of the dead. I gazed back, calmly.

After a long moment he stuttered, "It's not possible ... So long since I have heard anything like that ..."

"Yes," I interrupted, not wanting him to say any more in front of Jacques or Philippe.

My son shrugged as he did when a boy, trying to pull himself out of some disturbing dream. "Heard anything like what, Mother?" he said. Jacques looked lost in thought. In the air before my eyes hung a prison cell with its two doomed souls, cries in the night, a hymn sung so beautifully a man cried, then a snapped arm never rightly set.

You never came back, I thought silently. He could have used you over those lonely years. I could have used you at the end. But of course it wasn't your fault. You didn't know. Each thought the other was dead. It was a good assumption in those days. Oh, Erik, the friends you pushed away. The friends you never found. The friends you never thought you had.

I felt suddenly cold as the marble around me. The air grew violet, and I shivered with terror, feeling suddenly exposed and vulnerable, as if all my insides were laid out on a cold slab as neatly as those of the poor girl in the coffin. What would Philippe find when he plunged his gloved hands deep into me? What foul and contorted masses would he pull out?

Jacques caught me in his arms, and near me Philippe stood, eyes blazing black with streaks of gold.

Father Durant patted Philippe gently on the sleeve. "She's just swooned. Women do that here, you know that. Look, her color has come back. She will be fine. Doctor De Chagny, do you remember that you promised to come by the rectory and drink a glass of wine with me afterwards?"

"Yes, yes," Philippe said absently. "Mother, I hope you go back to your hotel and rest." Philippe used the same tone when he sent sick or irritable children to bed, and inside I bristled.

"Can you stand?" Jacques asked, and I nodded.

"I'm fine. I just lost a little breath there. Philippe, go have your wine, and take a nice luncheon along with it. Father Durant, I hope you did not mind my voice after you were finished. It just seemed ... fitting." I hoped I sounded calm, hiding my hands in my sleeves to disguise their trembling.

"It is never wrong to honor Our Lady," he answered, and his eyes were warm. "But a most unusual tune, quite unique. A remarkable composer, no doubt." He turned to Philippe. "I would ask your mother to grace us with her presence, but I believe she has other plans." Then, to me, "But tomorrow, Madame, if you wish you may come by the rectory and see my garden. There is not much else for me to do these days, the occasional memorial Mass, sometimes a funeral."

"Mother," Philippe said, and at first I didn't think he would kiss me, but finally he did, a good full smack on each cheek, and he gripped me tightly. I wanted to comfort him, say something to cut the thin wires of tension between us, but he looked away hastily and told his man to bring the car around to the rectory, as he and Father Durant would be walking. With a stiff nod towards Jacques he turned away and the two went off among the copper rooftops of that little stone city.

Suddenly I wanted to call to him, summon him back, tell him it would all be better. But what, exactly? He flew out of my hand, that long dark bird, the son of his father. He and Father Durant turned on a street or alleyway, for that city of the dead had them too, just like ours of the living. Soon they disappeared from sight, the short wizened crow and the tall black stork.

o o o o o o o

The cab-driver was snoring lightly when Jacques ushered me into the taxi. Flushed and confused, he patted my hand as I inhaled a little of the smelling salts. "He doesn't like me," he finally said.

The sharp smell pulled me forward into the present. "No, he doesn't. Something you did really angered him. He used to do this as an adolescent, get himself into these stubborn moods, and it was impossible to dislodge him until he decided to break free of it himself." I rested against the leather seat back and closed my eyes, feeling naked and revealed, as if all the skin had been peeled off me.

Jacques said softly, "Do you want to go back to your hotel?"

Noonday was hot, especially in a black dress. "I want to see you," I whispered. "I didn't come to Paris just for this," and waved my hand at the cold stone boxes of the dead.

"The Bois de Vincennes, perhaps ..." but then he stopped when he saw my face.

"Not the Bois, not a restaurant, nothing like that." Then at once I lay on his chest, and would have burrowed myself into it if I could have. "I don't want to see anyone but you. There's no privacy in this city. I feel on display, like some kind of sideshow entertainer that people come to gawk at. Perhaps later, Jacques, I'll want to roam about Paris. But not now."

I couldn't see his face, but could feel him thinking, trying to hold in his breath.

"There is someplace, even though perhaps you might not find it respectable. However, we can talk, or sit, have a meal. Anything you wish."

"Respectable," and I laughed a little. "I used to dance on tables in little towns outside of Uppsala. I was eight or nine and still wore my hair down. Papa would play the fiddle or the _nyckelharp_, and I would whirl around but I never fell off. When I was sixteen, the man who later became my husband would have proposed to me, but he couldn't, because I was a peasant, you see, and everyone knows peasant girls are good for one thing." Then the urge came over me again, tell him, tell him everything. "I would like to talk to you, away from eyes and ears and out of the sun. But I can't imagine where we would go, were it not a cafe or restaurant." He said nothing, only looked at me with soft brown eyes, and I noticed his lashes were dark, not red like his brows. "I think I'm a little too old to be seduced," I finally said.

"It's the only place I can think of where we can be alone. I don't want you to go back to the Cotillion, or take the next train for Belgium." He stroked my face and I felt tears come up from somewhere, deep down.

"Wherever you wish, then."

He gave instructions to the driver, and the engine started with a jerk. We turned down one narrow street, then another, until we came to a small, old building that seemed to have escaped the Hausmann renovations. The driver turned into the back, where a canopy sheltered the carriage from prying and indiscreet eyes.

I almost laughed out loud. Jacques had brought me to one of the few _maisons des rendezvous_ left in Paris, no doubt. "Wait here," he said, and I could imagine Martine's glittery eyes taking in the whole scene, disapproving. Moments passed, and the sweat started to trickle down the back of my heavy dress. This is mad, I told myself, trying to suppress all the warmth I felt inside. I'm about to go into a disreputable hotel with a man. Although it looks decent enough, and that's beautiful ironwork around the gate, vines with big flat leaves and thick symmetrical blossoms.

"It's ready," he said when he returned, and when I took his strong round arm, he trembled a little.

The little parlor and bedroom both had balconies and windows. They looked as if they'd been furnished from the _Maison de l'Art Nouveau _emporium from two decades ago. I took off my hat, and pulled the curtains covered with lilies. Behind me, Jacques lit a pipe and the fragrant apple-smoke smell filled the room.

"Would you like to rest?" and he gestured towards the small boudoir almost entirely filled with a bed and its curved wooden headboard. The thick curtains kept out the afternoon, filling the room with a glow that would have been twilight, had it been violet and not green. The fabric rippled in the breeze like waves against the side of a boat. I shook my head. "I'll sit here with you."

In a Japanese silk-covered armchair he spread himself by the cold fireplace, puffing slowly, his tobacco pouch resting on his thigh. The remote and narrow street had little traffic, and somewhere, perhaps in the linden trees outside the windows, some squirrels chattered. The silence was sweet, like a warm green bath. Then he said, "I think I saw you perform once, long ago in Paris. I wasn't sure at first. That's why I stared at you so, when you first came into my office. When you sang that hymn at the cemetery, though, then I knew."

"So long ago. You must have been a schoolboy."

"I was sixteen. Some aria from _Sappho_, do you remember it?"

"How could I forget? It wasn't really a full performance, but a _mélange_ of Maestro Gounod's pieces put on for the subscribers so to raise money. Maestro loved that work as we love our first child, even though Paris didn't. He came himself to conduct, and I remember him praising me for "O my lyre immortal. The leading soprano at the time, a great Messalina of an Italian named Carlotta, would have done it herself if she could have been bothered to sing for subscribers' benefits. So your father must have brought you, then?"

"They introduced you as new, as I recall, and said you were full of promise."

"Then, I wasn't, really." I had not yet met Erik and thus had sung a cold and remote Sappho, with none of the passion I found later in her poetry. "She had a warmth I lacked at the time."

"Later my father met a group of his friends who poked me and asked me how I liked the singers. To them, the poetess was simply an obscene joke, but I listened anyway." He reddened, but didn't look away. "It was Monsieur Gounod's 'first child,' wasn't it?"

"An orphan, you might say, one not as loved as it should have been. Like Sappho herself."

"Your first child is loved."

A little startled, I said, "Yes, he is."

"I bear him no ill will, I want you to know that. He has a sadness about him, perhaps from the loss of his father, perhaps because of a fundamentally melancholic nature. If there is to be a rupture between you two, I will withdraw."

"You know I don't want that. You have to understand Philippe. He's not overly sensitive or embarrassed. We had no storks visiting at our house. If Philippe attended a lying-in, the children knew that meant he'd delivered a baby. I don't think he resents you. But he has a strong feeling of everything in its place, and you just didn't fit."

He smiled, and it seemed we had been sitting in that warm verdant room forever. "He hasn't said anything to you about looking for another solicitor?"

"No," I said, hesitant. "Has he said that to you?"

"In yesterday's mail. I wrote him at once and told him that it wouldn't be necessary, as I was selling my share in the firm and retiring from the practice of law."

"What? That's incredible, Jacques, why?"

"It's what I wanted to tell you, one of the reasons I asked you to come to Paris. A letter didn't seem fitting, entirely, and I only wrote your son because he seemed so anxious to sever his tie with the firm. He holds a grudge, doesn't he?"

I felt as if I were being pulled in two. There was the old priest – it had to be him, didn't it? The one who knew Erik back during the war? And Philippe's fit of sullen temper against Jacques, and his stubborn refusal to break out of it. Then there was this latest shock, that Jacques was no longer serving as an attorney, no, more important than that, was no longer my attorney. I moistened my handkerchief with cologne and dabbed it around my lips, almost too surprised to speak.

When I didn't, he went on. "I imagine you will want to know how I am to live. It was simple, really. The article about the British secret service trying to learn French war secrets regarding automated soldiers produced more of a stir than I realized. Then someone at _Les Temps_ put the two articles together in his mind – the military technology one, and the buildup of tensions between Germany and Belgium and France. They want me to write for them on military matters in a regular column, and will leave me free to take other assignments if I wish. I can't believe it, Christine, it's something I've wanted for years. When that brass ring came around the carousel, I didn't stop to think, I simply grabbed ahold and swung myself up onto the platform."

He almost rose out of his chair, so full of vibrant life he was. But I only half-heard him, because the priest still stood before me, eyes bright with tears that did not fall, and the request issued so calmly, yet with such suppressed urgency. Finally I managed, "I'm happy for you," and then the thought came to us both at the same time.

He was first to voice it. "_Les Temps_ will pay me to travel. They want me to go to Berlin and write on German militarization. That won't be popular, I can assure you, but this is a progressive publication and they don't believe all those old warhorses left over from the last war with the Prussians, who never learned the first lesson and are about to have a second one drubbed into them. It's not _elan vital_ that wins wars. No one cares how much 'spirit' you have – it's a matter of men and materiel, of strategy and tactics. But then," and he held his hand out to me, but instead of taking mine pulled me close to him where he sat, "there's also talk of us opening an office in Brussels."

I curled up against him, comfortable on his lap. "But you told me to leave Brussels, as I recall." He rubbed my shoulder with his free hand as he set down his pipe, and squirmed a little, so I asked, "Am I too heavy?"

"You are perfect," and he took off his glasses, rubbing the two little indentations on either side of his nose. "Yes, I did tell you it would be best to leave. But I might need to be there."

"I would like that," I whispered, and then I knew he had been tight with tension because he now relaxed, and his warm soft front became softer still as he folded me up close. I kissed the little sore points on his nose.

Then he said into my neck, "I wanted to hold you like this all morning. Thank you for coming to see me, for coming with me," and then we said nothing for a long time in that soft green room with the curtain-cushioned breeze rippling through like waves. He tasted like the sweet tobacco, too, and I rubbed my face like a cat on his sidewhiskers in between kisses.

He carried me to the sculpted bed and unbuttoned my shoes, then rolled my stockings down. There was something slow and shy in his movements, and I laughed when he ran his hand up my thigh and said something in a startled voice about the slit in my pantalettes.

"I'm old-fashioned," I said. "This always made more sense. I never understood the young girls who wanted to practically disrobe every time nature called."

It took a long time for us both to undress. We slid under the sheets and his body hit me like a shock of soft-skinned warmth. He smelled like apples and sweat and I breathed him in like a drowning woman inhales the ocean. Then he was touching me where no fingers other than my own had ever gone and I reached for him as well.

That part all men share with Adam was like a club, rounded and powerful and thick. He closed his eyes and groaned with pleasure under my hand, and his thighs trembled. I cupped him in my hands gently and said softly, "The little bag of life," and he chuckled, "I suppose so."

I wanted to feel his flesh on my face and so I went everywhere. It was marvelous to run my cheek over what had before only revealed itself to the eye. His thighs were as delightful as I had thought, strong and full of muscle but a little soft where they met the body, and between them pulsed that energetic stalk.

Without shame we threw off what covered us, and with my cheek I felt the smooth hot line of hard flesh that quivered as it waited for me to take it in hand or mouth or my own hungry cleft.

"Christine," he breathed, begging, and so up his body I ascended, pulling myself up over his flesh arm by limb, cheek by lip. As I climbed I passed the deep sweet gulf of his navel and slid along a forest of slithery bronze hair which adorned the mound of his belly. Between his breasts fluffy hair glistened red-gold in the green-filtered sun. Under my fingers the little pearly nipples grew firm.

Deep beneath that landscape of flesh and fur he called to me from the chest. At the peak I had arrived, and so with a shudder he pulled me down onto him in one firm swift swipe.

My arms were all full of him, and my body as well. "Sit up," he said, and so I rose and straddled across his wide hips. Then like little mouths his fingers kissed me everywhere, pulling tenderly on the tips of my breasts, flickering down my belly until he found that secret spot again. As he gently thrust he stroked, holding me with one big arm and touching me gently, expertly with the other. Then there was no speech between save cries and whispers and tiny moans. Pleasure exploded first in my back, far down, then opened up like a blossom of delight all through my clefted hips, and I fell on him, clutching him like a hand.

He rolled me over in one fast motion, and pressed me under his heaviness, thrusting hard while I still pulsed blindly like some sea creature. "Can you bear my weight?" he asked in between hard breaths, and I didn't answer, just pulled him deeper into me with arms and legs and two grasping mouths.

Deeper and harder he went, and a few drops from his brow fell onto mine. Then I closed my eyes and fell into that rhythmic dark of pull, push, inside, then slightly outside only to push all the way in again. A deeper pleasure arose from far down inside of me, something primitive and almost painful in its intensity, and then I spent myself again when he did. It was like being underwater, so much wetness everywhere, his and mine. He lay gasping at my side and when I lay on his chest and licked the pink tip of his breast, I tasted salt like the Brittany sea.

I had been over oceans, waded up to my waist in waters on three continents, but no salt from any of them tasted so warm and familiar as that on Jacques' body, the salt of a seacoast from long ago that bathed pink rocks with its grey-green shimmering light.

He took my hand and rested it on the curve of his side. It was like sitting in a rain puddle, but neither of us cared, and the early fall air wafted over and cooled us. From a small bedstand he took a towel and dried me.

"I should do that," I murmured.

"Why?"

"No reason," I said sleepily, and when I looked around the room again, the sun had long since gone, and the green-lit curtains now shone dark, almost black against the night sky. Somewhere on the street below someone was playing an accordion, and a girl laughed. I watched the streetlights below cast moving patterns on the wall as the curtains shifted.

Jacques gently snored, and I pulled his heavy sleeping arm around me. He's going to Berlin, I thought. It's like putting your head into the lion's mouth. Then I remembered that when the new day came, I was to go see Father Durant at the rectory where he stayed, and I shivered a little when I thought of what I had done, the love Jacques and I had made together. It made me a little afraid. Then I slid back under his arm and pressed my face into the soft flesh of his side, and slept again until some time in the very early morning, when the moon had shifted and the accordion no longer moaned.

He awoke full and urgent and took me in the night, and this time I cried out because the deep delight swept through me as if I wasn't there at all, as if there was none of myself or my history or anything left, only a deep-splitted body receiving a large and full one, and I did not care if my cries were heard on the street below. I don't know how I got on top of him, or even who was inside whom anymore. At one point it felt as if I had mounted him and was thrusting myself between his legs, as if his thick maleness was something we shared between the two of us. I pinned him down and held him by the arms until he himself cried out with abandoned helplessness.

Then we clung to each other with no life raft. Night's ocean swallowed us and didn't spit us out until the dawn shone cool and pale through the windows.

"Are you thirsty?" he asked, stretching himself awake. "I'm parched myself. I haven't been so dry since I sailed from Libya to Constantinople. You've wrung every drop from me," and he smiled widely.

He went away for a little while and I dozed until he brought a tray with soda water and some juice. He mixed up spritzers and I used his linen shirt for a robe while we sat and drank. "I'm having breakfast sent up, too."

"I have to go back to the Cotillion sometime." I hated the thought of putting on that hot black mourning dress, and wanted a light batiste summer frock instead. "Then I am to visit Father Durant."

"Not to confess, I hope," he said, but he looked a little nervous.

"What would be the point of that? Because I can't promise not to do it again. That is, if you can't."

He looked a little shocked. "You think I'm going to discard you now? Christine, don't even think it. I want you to stay with me, no, don't interrupt, I know that each of us has the destinations to which we are called. Not just for a few days, either. But for now we can ring the Cotillion and have your things sent over, or if you don't like this place, I can find another ..." but I raised a finger to interrupt him.

"I'm not good at this. I've never been anyone's mistress," and as I said it, I realized with a shock that it was true. Erik might have bought love in the thick woods of the Bois de Boulonge or in some house in the Pigalle where a mask was one of the less unusual things a man might wear, but he had never made me his mistress. It was a strange feeling, unsettling, yet freeing too.

"You think I brought you here simply to seduce you."

"If you did, that was all right. I wanted you to."

"I think of it as more than a seduction. I love you, I told you that. If you don't love me now, or yet, then I can accept that too. When you love me, you will say it."

"I know," I answered. "Don't look sad. Then something occurred to me. "Jacques, I won't do what she did, tell you that I love you when I don't. You and I have come to a point in life where we both have hurts, old wounds that have scarred over and some which never have quite healed. I have burdens I've never let down, never shared. So I can feel them in another person, in you."

He took me in his arms, then, and I played with the fur on his chest for a few minutes. Once Raoul and I walked out onto a dock on the Brittany coast, and he pulled off his shirt and shoes. In his flapping white undershirt he leapt into the cold water. I had no shoes to kick off, for I went barefoot as a peasant all summer long. Infuriated with jealousy, anxious to keep up with him, I ran as fast as I could and jumped heedless in the water next to him. My skirts dragged me down and I had to struggle for the shore. Wet, dripping, he laughed and said there were some places I could never follow him, and to sea was one. But I didn't care, because I had done it, even though it was wet and sandy and uncomfortable.

"I have something to tell you, Jacques," I said, and he saw my seriousness. "A story that I've never fully told anyone, not even my husband."

"Christine," he said, putting his finger on my lips. "It isn't necessary. You don't need to tell me just because you think it will keep me. I'm not going anywhere, unless you send me away."

"Yes, it is necessary. I want you to know. But it has to be between us, because my children don't know it. Philippe doesn't know it."

"Ah, Philippe," he said. "I understand."

"Hear it first, and then see if you understand. Because it's been over thirty years, and I don't know if I do, not entirely."

He sat up and pulled me against him. "It's all right. Just tell it how you will."

I inhaled deeply, feeling as I did when I looked over that dizzying ledge on the roof of the Palais Garnier, only what met me below was a great beating heart instead of cold slush-streaked pavement. It's been a long time since I jumped, I thought. Now there are arms to catch me.

"It was the autumn of 1880, and I had just signed the first season's contract as a soprano at the National Opera. I'd only been out of the conservatory a short time. I had stopped by my dressing room to hang up a costume, and sat for a moment at my dressing table to freshen up. I heard something come from far away at first, the most wonderful singing, not quite a man's voice but it didn't sound like a woman's, either. I ran into the empty hall and looked right and left. Soon it filled my room, and I listened to it for several minutes, forgetting that I should be afraid. Then a voice came, so soft, and it called my name ..."

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Erik had taken Raoul to the Communard cells, and I sat alone in his staid rooms, looking into the fire that never went out. He had said that if I would only love him, he would do whatever I wanted. In my shock and horror, I had kept myself cold and distant. When he came after my body, I lay there like a corpse, unresistant, unmoving, trying as hard as I could to not feel or hear or smell the man pounding away at my flesh. When I glowed with desire the last time he covered me, it was not of my own will.

But could I give myself without reserve to that motley mass of tearful passion? If he thinks I will stay, if he thinks that I truly can be his "living wife," and not simply an unresponsive body, perhaps I can convince him to let Raoul go. Before, when I was tied to the chair and showed him my throat, it stemmed his anger. Perhaps I should now show him more than my throat.

I carefully undressed and wrapped up my nakedness in his embroidered silk robe. Undone, my hair fell all over my shoulders, for I remembering how moved he was by the sight of my hair. Then I sat on that old-fashioned curved Louis-Phillipe bed whose red mahogany gleamed in the lamplight, and waited for a long time.

The outside door scraped open. I called out that I was here, in the bedroom, and would he like to come in? He held himself up on the doorframe as he came into the room, breathing in great gasps. At first I thought it was because I was arrayed like an odalisque on the bed, but he clutched his leg as if some pain or pressure deep inside it refused to let him go.

He walked over to me slowly, looking at me as if he were dreaming and something had happened for which he had no plan, no scheme, no ready retort. His mouth moved senselessly, then he said, "He's safe." A great wave of pity came over me. I was the one sitting almost naked and defenseless on the bed, but his masked face was far more unclothed, more undone than any attitude of mine. His deep eyes searched my face for something, some meaning, some new explanation.

I held my arms out to him. He bent toward me, closer. "Take it off," I said quietly, lifting the lower flap of black silk away from his face. "You don't need it with me. Don't you think I know what you look like?" He shook his head a little, but didn't resist. "May I?" I asked, ready to drop the delicate flap at the least sign of hesitation on his part.

Finally he nodded, and I slipped it off. The band had cut a deep groove in the skin of his scalp and I rubbed it gently. Skin came off in flakes, and absently I brushed them away. He looked ill and exhausted, his skin whiter than I had ever seen. Two rosy circles glowed in the middle of his cheeks, and a faint sheen of sweat shone across his forehead.

"Don't burn this one," he said weakly.

"I won't," I answered. The mask was moist from his breath, and I laid it on my pillow. His head will rest there tonight. He'll seize my hair in his hands and clutch it all night the way a child clings to his mother's skirt. He will wind his limbs around mine and together we'll sink to the bottom of some turbulent mud ocean where the storms rage even more fiercely beneath the surface than above.

Gently I massaged around his mostly-bald head, rubbing the spots sore from the mask, stroking the few silver-black curls. He sat next to me on the bed and rested his head on my shoulder but didn't touch me otherwise. His body was so long that he bent over, and when he lowered his head into the cleft of my neck, I rubbed his wide shoulders lightly, feeling the rigid muscles shake underneath.

He was shivering, although the room was warm, warmer than it had ever been.

I kept waiting for him to demand to lie with me, but he just pressed his face into me, and when my arms went around him he gave a deep sigh. Then he took my face in both his hands, and a little fear flashed up, was he going to kiss me, or bite me? I tried not to flinch, afraid that if he did attempt to kiss my mouth and I shuddered or remained unmoved, that he would exact some terrible revenge, and so I opened my mouth a little, waiting for him to take it, but he did not.

His hot breath wafted over my chin, then my cheek, and suddenly, almost abruptly, he kissed me on the forehead, his teeth pressing me through the skin. Then his hard, almost lipless mouth softened, and his lips remained, unwilling to break the contact with the skin of my brow. He explored all around my forehead with his mouth, breathing in the scent of my hair, tasting my skin with his tongue rough and hot like a cat's.

It's all he wants. It's all he thinks he deserves, and to my astonishment, an enormous sadness at the malice and malingering of God overcame me, that his spirit should be mired in such a ruin. The tears flew from my eyes, and I began to sob with exhaustion, with pity, with terror, with love.

"Poor, miserable Erik," I said, and then he began to cry, too. He slid down over my body and off the bed in a kind of collapse. My bare feet dangled over the edge of the tall bed and he took them in his hands, caressing them with his face, crying on them and watering them with tears. Then with soft movements he brushed my feet with the long unkempt patchy locks that stuck out of the sides of his head, weeping tears and wiping. He held my tear-soaked feet in his hands and kissed them. His touch was not only hot, it burned, and I knew at once that he burned not from desire but from fever, hot and dry.

I stood up from the bed and let the robe slip from my shoulders down to my waist. He slid up to me, his flesh hot through his own clothes. Wrapping his arms around my waist, he reached with blind sorrowful fingers for the mask on the pillow. I pushed his hand out of the way, and this started a fresh flow from my eyes.

I cried for him, for me, for whatever horror and madness my life held from this point, for the child I suspected lay in my womb, and for the child on my bosom whose mother covered him up, who pushed him away, who drove him out.

He touched my nearest breast hesitantly, as if afraid of being slapped. I laid down on the bed and he crawled awkwardly in next to me, pulling his leg up and over with his hand. I offered my breast to him. My chest was wet from our sorrowing, and a teardrop balanced on the tip of my breast, his or mine, it didn't matter. He took both tear and tip into his mouth and held them there gently, not sucking, only resting, while I caressed the flaked and scaly top of his head.

His lips weren't fleshless after all, just inverted to the point that the soft pads barely emerged from the tight-drawn skin, and as he held my breast in his mouth I drew him toward me in a deep embrace. Under the fine linen of his shirt I could feel the sharpness of his bones, the ridged spine, the shoulders like axe-blades; the accordioned ribs, the muscle taut under the shirt. He was being consumed from within.

Never before had I, or probably anyone else, so tenderly stroked his flesh. He nestled next to me and I rubbed his arms and breast and back, everywhere I could reach. I pulled his loose shirt up and ran my hands up under, all around his back and shoulders. I did not desire him, but if he had wanted me, I would have opened to him and taken him in my arms. He lay quietly, with just a tiny tremor now and then. Then he seemed to sleep a little, for his breathing grew soft and regular, and his limbs relaxed until they rested on me heavily. I caressed his neck and the back of his head, feeling the coarse ripples of that fractured skin, my heart sorry and sad and consumed with tenderness all at the same time.

I closed my eyes and dozed too, never quite sunk into sleep, always aware of his arms around my waist and his head defenseless and buried in soft flesh. He breathed in the deep sleep of the completely exhausted.

I pulled his head, that hideous thing, tighter to my chest and gently rocked him back and forth. Later my own babies would hold my breast in the same way when they were all full of milk and sleep, just holding onto the end for comfort, for contact. As the babies slept, I would remember that stony room so long ago, when Erik ceased to be a terrifying man of unrelenting ugliness, and became simply a child at the source of life, holding on even in sleep.

I don't know how long we lay there, but my arms and legs were stiff when he finally began to stir. When his eyes opened again, he looked up at me without tears this time, for all the old ones had dried. One new wet bead still stood in the corner of my eye, so he wiped it and placed it in his mouth.

"Hold me," he said very low, and he shivered a little as he explored my face and neck with his mouth, then lay for a long time just stroking my hair, his face pillowed on my breasts.

Something quiet and final hung in the room, and I knew he wouldn't try to push open my legs or enter my body.

"I'm very tired," he said, after awhile.

"You need rest." I wondered if he'd had to carry Raoul, or had struggled with him.

"Rest will come soon enough." He said it with such finality that I feared for him a little.

"You made me promise not to kill myself. You have to promise the same."

"Erik won't kill himself. It won't be necessary. Nature is economical, and we all end up feeding her worms whether we hasten the process or not. That is, unless the pain is too great, and then Erik might elude her talons." He stroked my breast gently. "So soft. They're softer than when you let Erik hold them last."

I thought back to the first time he had taken them in the scales of his hands, weighing them like chicken fillets at the market. "I've put on flesh since. That's why they're softer."

Instead of answering, he closed his eyes and I could tell he was far away, in a liferaft adrift on the sea of his own thoughts. I barely heard him speak since his face muffled in my breasts again, but it sounded like he said, "Your boy will like that."

My boy? Did he mean the child I suspected of hiding under my heart? He couldn't mean Raoul, locked up until I somehow proved to Erik that even if I did not love him, I would show him tenderness. Then a little despair tugged at me, because I had lied to him about having my courses when I didn't. But since I'd lied, I didn't want to tell him otherwise, and anyway, no one really knew if a child grew in the womb until the mother felt it quicken.

I sighed and Erik nuzzled down further, still muttering into my flesh and barely audible. "He won't appreciate what Erik gives him. Boys are never appreciative. They don't understand the sacrifices others make for them. But I can be generous, even if Erik doesn't want to. I can show him," and on he went like that. He must be talking about his own father, I thought, and how he will do things differently when he has a son of his own.

Ignoring his odd murmurings was impossible. So I leaned over to listen more carefully as he mumbled. "It's not possible to keep them down here, even if Erik was generous. It would be tempting to visit them and watch them as they grew up together. It could be a sort of compromise. Then Erik could at least see, there would be some time to see, if nothing else," and he shook with a little private laugh. "But no. Birds need the air of the forest, not the fire in the bowels of the earth that fuels the iron trees of the jungle. Birds need sunlight and a life of their own. They want to ride in the park with the top down on the carriage and feel the wind in their faces. This is no place for them, even if they would let me keep them. If they would let me keep them both."

It was as if he argued with himself. "Erik would need a mask all the time. No, he wouldn't, because she's seen and she doesn't need it. But he hasn't, and how will he ever get used to it?"

I could bear it no longer. I shook him a little to dislodge him from his dream. "Erik. Listen to me. If we have a child, a son, you do not need to wear a mask for him."

He pulled me up and looked at me with the most anguish-filled eyes I will ever see, in this life or the next. All the dreamy relaxation of his sleep in my arms was gone, but he wasn't angry. He was sad. Tears filled his black eyes and rolled freely down his cheeks. "A son?" he said, with no sarcasm or bitterness, just exhausted sorrow. "There won't be a son, Christine. Everything's changed. There won't ever be a son."

"What are you talking about?" I put my hand towards his shoulder, but he waved me off. "I don't understand. I don't want you to wear a mask, and any child will not know his father's face to look any different. Children grow up with things and they get used to them." But my words made no mark on him as he hung his head silently and soaked the front of his own shirt with tears. Then fear seized me violently around the middle, and that which I had never let myself think of or see, slithered out like a snake that crawls out across the highway and stops the carriage, because the horses simply will go no further.

He thinks a child will look like him.

"No child of yours will ever wear a mask," I said firmly.

"Oh, God," he cried, his face in his hands now. "Don't make this any harder. As it is, it's like tearing off limbs. Good-bye, soft ones," he said, pulling my robe shut and patting the front. Then he whirled off the bed in a fit of violent agitation that almost made me lose my water, as I had when he first tied me to that chair. "No, Erik!" he shouted. "You cannot keep them both! The boy had to go no matter what, you always knew that. There was never any question of keeping them here together! They would sicken and die, I told you, or they would conspire together and kill you, not that it matters anymore anyway."

Up and down the room he marched, tearing at his clothes, dragging his wounded leg, stopping occasionally to grasp it and catch his breath. Then, as if some part of him had given up the struggle and slunk away in resigned surrender, he sank onto an ottoman and rested his head on his knees, breathing heavily.

I pulled his robe tighter around me, wishing I was dressed. Somehow he seemed colder, very far away. "The boy always had to go," he said quietly to his knees. "She will go with him too," and then my heart took a great confused leap, not wanting to believe it.

This was some new trick of madness or deception, some new test of loyalty. He was going to pretend to let me go with Raoul, then wheel on me if I showed myself at all anxious. Anger rose up in me, and I felt cheated out of the tender defenselessness that caressed us both when he lay in my arms. No wonder no one has loved him, I said coldly to myself. How could anyone, when he pulls them forward and pushes them back all at the same time? So this is the ploy. Well, it's not going to work this time.

He sat there for a long time, arms wrapped under his knees, gently rocking, while lightning flashes of feeling erupted through the clouds surrounding my heart. Then he looked up. He hesitated, but I could tell that he was calm now. "You still sit there?" he asked. "I thought this is what you wanted, that you would be out of the door like the horses at the Longchamps gate when they hear the crack of the bullet."

"Erik, don't mock me. What more do you want? This is just cruel, the worst mockery of all."

He rose up painfully. "It is no mockery, no jest. I thought you understood. I love you, Christine, and you don't love me. Erik cries inside at the thought, it's like being killed, but at least with death there is blackness and the end to pain, but while I live this anguish will never cease, that you don't love me."

I opened my mouth to speak, but he turned away. "Don't say it. That was not part of our bargain, that you would lie to me and say that."

"All right. I won't."

"Thank you. Leave me that shred of dignity as a man, at least. So why aren't you getting dressed?"

"If you wish me to, I will. Are we going somewhere?"

"You are going somewhere."

"Where, Erik?" I asked, choking down a rising anxiety.

"To the Communard cells."

The room grew dim. Oh dear God, was he going to lock me up in there too? How could he, after resting so trustingly on my breast? We were right back where we started, in the terrible dilemma of my fear of terror beyond imagining, and Raoul's life in the balance. He cannot lock me up in there. He can't. I don't care what I promised, or what I said, or even about Raoul's life anymore. This isn't like dying in a flash of smoke and fire. He couldn't do that, he couldn't, not lock me up in a windowless dark pit, to slowly go mad and die. The shards from that shattered basin are still in the waste can. I can get to one, I know I can. But he will not take me there.

Erik had showed me how to calm myself with long deep breaths before going on stage. I drew in a few long ones, and then breathed them out. "I won't go. You can't make me. I will fight you."

Astonished, he looked up. "But that's madness," he said, and he sounded so reasonable I laughed like a madwoman myself, a high mirthless shriek. "You don't love Erik," he said. "Why wouldn't you go?"

"What?" I wailed. "If I'm mad, you've driven me to it. Why would you lock me up in a cell? Isn't it enough that I am with you now, that I will stay with you here and honor my promise? Do you have so little regard for me, so little trust that you would do that?"

Wringing his hands, he stood before me. "Lock you in a cell? It's not to put you in one that I take you with me down there. It is to take someone out."

"What?" I said weakly, collapsing onto the bed. "You mean Raoul?"

He nodded.

"Why?"

"Because you love him. Erik saw you on the rooftop. He heard the boy when he was in the iron forest give you to Erik. Shall I let an almost-beardless youth show me up in matters of generosity?" The last part tore out of him, ragged and full of pain. "Unless you want to let him sit in there, of course. He can't be terribly comfortable, chained to the wall like that." Then he turned to me, ripped between sarcasm and tenderness. "I can't go get him alone. The Mazendaran perfume has worn off by now, and he would struggle. If I kill him, then that would serve as a severe impediment to our marriage, would it not?" His voice was dry and harsh. "If he kills me, then he wanders around down there, perhaps finding the way back, perhaps not, and there would be no hope for him should the others that roam this darkness track and find him."

Did he lie? How could I know? If he was indeed lying, he could stuff me in a living crypt, and there would be no refuge in a swift death. If he told the truth, one or the other of them might die, and even though Erik shook with fever and was weak, it would probably be Raoul.

He held his hand out to me, and I saw in my mind that first time he had tried to take my hand, when I had shrunk from the memory of its clammy coldness and its smell. I took his now, because there was no other choice than to trust him, and his flesh wasn't cold anyway. He pulled me towards him in a full and final embrace, and all on their own my arms went around him, and pulled him up to me. His chest was hard and flat and my tears wet it a little, because there was nothing else to do but trust him. There were no ribs to be felt on his side, just thin plates of muscle like hammered armor, the skin thickened in some spots, pitted in others.

"Don't," he said, and pulled my hand away from his side.

But I wanted to give him something more than that flat and fleshless hug. I took his face in my hands and drew it to mine. He wouldn't let me kiss his mouth. Turning away he said, "I can't bear it." My lips grazed the side of his forehead, and then he stopped and turned that long mournful face slowly to mine again. I kissed him on the brow and tasted salt, for he sweated heavily. He straightened up, staring at me as if seeing me for the first time. Then he turned away slowly, and even from an arm's length distant I could hear his heart break.

"I'll leave you to dress," he said in a voice toppled and broken, a tower struck by lightning collapsing into rubble.

(continued...)


	24. Claiming the Spoils

**Claiming the Spoils**

Words slid like hands over flesh as Jacques listened to the conclusion of my tale. He offered me the last of the coffee, his heavy face suffused with tenderness and concern.

"It's your story too now," I said, finally.

"But your son, Philippe, he doesn't know."

"No. Not yet."

"It's a weighty responsibility, to know something that he does not. Do you plan to tell him? Is it absolutely necessary?"

"He's known all his life that something about him was different. I've dodged it, always."

"Perhaps now he's accommodated. Not everything concealed needs to be uncovered, Christine."

I felt my face darken. "Do you wish I had had the same thought a few hours ago, before I began my tale? Perhaps I should have ... 'accommodated' you, and left you in the same dark you wish me to leave Philippe."

"Of course not!" and he set his coffee cup down a little too hard. "It's just that his whole life will be uprooted, and he is already angry enough as it is."

I sighed, thinking of Philippe's closed, pained face when he turned away from Jacques and I in the cemetery the day before. "He has been angry before, and it passes. In that sense, he has a lot of his father in him. Raoul, I mean. 'Never let the sun set on an argument,' he would say. If only Martine had learned that. She is the one who carries grudges like the stigmata, and is always ready to unwrap them and show them to you."

"Why?" he said, curious.

"I don't know. Perhaps it was the matter of always growing up sandwiched in between Philippe on one hand, and Isabeau's shadow on the other. She was always a complacent child, very quiet. She doted on Philippe, followed him everywhere, but from the time Isabeau was old enough to walk, Philippe favored her little sister. I probably didn't handle it well. I kept Martine close to me, made her my little companion and helper, while Philippe and Isabeau made a dream world of their own. And then Isabeau died ..." I stopped to catch my breath. So many deaths, the scarcely-remembered death of my mother, my father's collapse into coughing and decline, Mama Valerius in a dusty rented room in Brussels, Raoul's stricken and paralyzed form carried home from the Bourse, and Erik's death – none of them made my heart tremble as did the loss of that little white-haired girl.

"After Isabeau's death," I recovered myself a little, "I didn't do much for months. Louvel was too young to understand, and he kept wanting to know why Isabeau couldn't play with him anymore, when was she going to come back from her holiday? Philippe showed almost no feeling at all, and later I came to know that it was because of me, that he was being strong for me. There was Martine caught right in the middle. I had been her mainstay, her companion, and it was as if I simply disappeared into this tearful, silent form who went from the couch to the bedchamber, barely eating or speaking. Raoul even thought of a sanitarium."

He pulled me over to him close, surrounding me in warmth, his words sharp and protective. "It's good that he did not, as I've seen too many women who never get out of those places. In my practice I could sometimes keep them out, but it was almost impossible once they went in." Then, softening, "She would be how old now, almost thirty?"

"I think of that all the time, but I can't imagine it. She's always a tiny girl in my thoughts. But poor Martine, even after I came back to myself, she didn't. She became clingy and even more jealous than before. Then, at school, the girls began to tease her with airs and clothes and invitations. Once it got out that we had a manor in France, there was no end to it. 'Martine, when will you invite us for a summer holiday in the country? Martine, why don't you have ponies? Why, your mother doesn't look like a grand lady at all,' and so on. She didn't know how to stop it."

"Had she been a boy, she would have knocked them down a few times, and that would have settled the matter," said Jacques. "I bruised my knuckles more than once, I can assure you, after being called 'Carrot' and 'Piggy' and far worse."

"It's different with men. Did you win?"

"Every time, and my father would slap me on the back and say, 'Give them another go-around if they need it,' but no one did. Had I grown taller, it would have stopped sooner. As it was, I became a bit of a boxer, and even played some rounds in my youth, from all that good practice."

"I would rather be pummeled by fists than sliced by tongues," I remarked. "It was something Erik never understood," and a great sad realization came over me. "I understand him lashing out when I unmasked his shame. But it was his endless needling, his sarcasm. I couldn't tell him then, how unnecessary it was, how it hurt. How even more than the bruises he left on me, that his sharp tongue left deeper marks where they could not be seen."

"Perhaps you could have loved him more, had he not had a woman's tongue."

"Perhaps. No, not perhaps. I've never said it to anyone, not even myself, but you're right. The answer is yes. I tried not to think about it. You understand why?"

"Of course. No woman's husband wants to know that she thinks of another, and no woman who loves her husband will even hint at that knowledge."

"I don't think of Erik like that, Jacques. I want you to know."

"I do know. But this story, this love, it is astounding. If Paris knew of it, Paris would be at your feet ..."

"And at the feet of the storyteller?" I interrupted. "Paris will never know. It's hard enough to think of telling Philippe." A cold little fear played at the edges of my warm confidence, my trust, the glow in my body that had not yet faded from the night before. "You cannot tell anyone. You cannot write about this, or let anyone know. That's not why I told you."

"I wish you trusted me, but nothing will assure you except time. Or perhaps there is something else that will rest your heart as well. What am I thinking?" He slid his glasses off, then slipped down in front of me and put his shaggy foxy head into my lap. Wrapping his arms around my knees, he said, muffled by his long shirt that almost covered my legs, "Marry me. Would any husband be so callous as to parade his wife's deepest secrets of the heart like a banner across the face of the world? We will find an attorney, and I will sign an agreement, so that you can see that I want not a sou of your fortune, not one coin of the inheritance that will pass to your children. I don't want your story to parade about, Christine, nor the de Chagny money. I want you."

I stroked his rough hair. "It's a cheat for you, Jacques. You'll have no children. And I won't tolerate mistresses, or a family somewhere else with some other woman."

"I would have had children by now, had I wanted them. I've had mamas throwing their daughters at me for decades, not that I'm bragging about it."

"Well, perhaps you are, just a little."

"As for mistresses, I haven't had one for years now."

"Unless you count me. Not that I mind. Perhaps I might grow to like it, even."

"Christine, seriously, don't banter with me. What do you say? Will you have me? Not as a fortune hunter, not as someone who would take your story and polish it to a jewel that would shine in every heart, but as a man, as I am?"

"I won't agree, Jacques, not yet. I have to put this to rights between Philippe and I. And how can that work, anyway, since you want me to go to Perros? Since you think this great war is coming, and don't want me swept up in the midst of it?" Then I understood his offer. "You don't have to ask for my hand, for me to believe in your sincerity." I kissed him on his broad forehead. "Besides, perhaps I like being your mistress, at least for awhile."

He sighed, and we sat like that until the noon sun stole all the shadows from the walls.

o o o o o o o o o o o

The gate around the old rectory stood half-open to the cool afternoon. In my hand I still clutched Philippe's telegram, left for me at my hotel like a yellow stain on a white dress. It was short and sharp. Since his telephone messages to my hotel were not returned, he had decided to depart for Belgium this very morning. He hoped that my current plans would not interfere with at least helping Anki get the family ready for the upcoming move to England. I was under no obligation, of course. And so on.

Broken stones welcomed me on the path up to the rectory, and I jammed the telegram message into my pocket. A little man in ragged clothes swept the newly-fallen leaves off the walk. He touched his cap and stared at me with black glittery eyes. Several ravens cawed and then swirled into flight as I brushed their hedge.

An iron gate creaked as I opened it into the little courtyard. There he was, Father Durant, the old priest. His patched and stained cassock fluttered as he pushed the spade in, pulled it out, then bent down to put something fat and brown into a bushel basket. It tumbled down over its companions, all dusty with earth.

"They're lovely potatoes," I commented, and he turned around, his seamed face stretched into a smile. "Earth apples. I've always loved that name for them." I held out my hand but he didn't take it, and for an odd second I thought that perhaps he could sense the sheen of fornication glistening under my glove. But no, it was that his right hand was the twisted one, and both hands were covered with flaky brown soil. He dipped his head in a small bow instead.

The ravens had returned to the hedge, fluttering overhead before landing. "Do you mind if I finish?" he said, and before I had a chance to answer, returned to his digging. The ground was light-brown, loamy. I wondered if he'd added the sand, or if it was like that naturally here in the Seine valley.

If I were home, I would know. Father always used to pick up dirt, run it between his fingers as expertly as the violin strings, sometimes even tasting it. Once when we first came to Uppsala, a householder angrily threatened him because he picked up a handful of earth from the man's side yard, just to see what it was like. But I didn't think Father Durant would mind, so I squeezed a bit between my fingers. It was sandy, but that made it loose and the potatoes had plenty of room to spread and grow. Their plump little brown bodies looked like children lined up in a trundle bed with earthy covers pulled over their heads.

"You need onions to go with those," I remarked. He laughed, a bright young laugh for such an old lined face, and nodded his head towards the rectory kitchen door, where long strings of onions and garlic were tied in thick ropes.

"My cook fried some up for your son yesterday," he remarked, after the last potato was laid to rest. "But he didn't eat them. A nervous man, Doctor de Chagny. Always worried that something is going to go wrong, or that someone will be unhappy. There's tea inside, if you wish."

"I'd rather sit out here, if you don't mind."

He wiped his dirty hands on his cassock as if it were an apron. "You knew him," he said, and I knew just whom he meant.

"I did. Long ago."

"How did he die?" I knew what he meant by that, too.

"There was no priest, but he died well."

"When?"

"A little before Pentecost, in 1881. He was ill, terribly ill."

"You were with him?"

"I was, to the very last. There was another there, a friend of his, a Persian man. He was a follower of Mahomet, but even he implored him to allow us to send for a priest. Nonetheless, he would not have one. I don't know how much he understood at the end, anyway. But we didn't, even though we should have, shouldn't we?"

"God knows his own," he said quietly.

"We were afraid."

Father Durant nodded. "And where does he rest?"

"Under the Place de l'Opera. No, it's not sacred ground, although to Erik it probably would have been. We didn't know what to do, or how to move him, or how to answer the gendarmes, or fill out a death notice." I looked around nervously. "Were you here at that time, Father? Right in this rectory?"

He looked away as he refilled the holes. "I thought he had died. If he had been arrested and then transported to New Caledonia, I thought I would have heard. They would have made such a mockery of him, with his face. It would have been a terrible public spectacle, and so when I heard nothing for months, then years, I knew that he had died."

"He thought the same of you. He said the last he saw you, they dragged you out and around the door. He heard your arm snap."

"It was a miracle," Durant said. "Look here," and he raised his loose dirty sleeve. The flesh twisted in a spiral, with a long fierce scar that radiated out into two prongs. "The bone pierced the flesh. They wouldn't cut it off, for I was to die soon anyway, and they didn't want to bother. I set it myself with a branch and the rags that I wore, thinking that it would fester before they shot me. But it didn't. Then they dragged us out by the dozens, all the prisoners of the Commune, and lined us up. I saw men from the National Guard still in fragments of their uniforms, men who had fought their own men when the French army tried to retake Paris, men in their carpenter's aprons, their workmen's caps still on their heads although streaked with blood.

"They lined us up and shot us. A bullet hit my shoulder, the same side as my wounded arm, thanks to the Blessed Virgin, and I fell, almost crushed by the men around me. When nightfall came I crawled out and hid for a few days, until the army came in and took the city. I hoped I would see him, but I never did."

"The two guards fought each other, and left Erik's cell door open," I said. "One fell, and he killed the other one. He hid in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera."

"Managed to elude the squads that went looking for Communards, I take it." Then his attention drifted back to his mangled arm. "I always wanted to tell him that the wound never stank, not all that time. When I recognized that beautiful sound of your hymn, because so many times he filled that stinking cell with it, I prayed with renewed hope that he was alive, and that no longer would I have to rely on reason alone, but could offer him something concrete, something real. Your son even remarked upon it, and he is not a gullible man either."

"No," I agreed. "He's not. He sat on that commission at Lourdes three years ago and examined the patients. Not one miracle in the whole lot of them."

"Sometimes natural healing can be a miracle."

I sat on the rough stone bench as he continued to dig. "Father," I began, hesitating. "I have something I want to tell you..."

"Shall I wash up and go for my stole? It really isn't necessary, you know. Face to face was good enough for the Irish priests before the coming of the Norsemen. The sanctity of the seal still stands."

"It's not a confession, Father."

"But you do have something to confess."

"Not here, and not now. Anyway, how would you know that?"

"I did speak with Doctor de Chagny yesterday, did I not? He had almost nothing else to say, besides how irritated he was at your choice of a companion."

That's what I was afraid of. "He doesn't like Monsieur Peillard."

"It's not that, Madame. Most grown children are disturbed at the sight of a mother or father in love."

"But I loved Monsieur de Chagny, every day."

He shrugged and patted the earth with his shovel. "All set for this spring. No, Madame, old love and new love are different. There is something about new love that sets everything around it aflame. You are his mother. It is natural that he feel this way. Only he is not quite like other men. He feels everything more acutely, thinks through everything more diligently. Yes, he told me about Monsieur Peillard at the Palais Garnier excavation. But I think it is an excuse."

"I don't know how to start. There's so much, it's all so big, and goes back over so many years."

"Do you love Monsieur Peillard?"

"I don't know," I said. "He loves me. He asked me this very morning to marry him," and then I felt myself redden, because of the circumstances. "Please don't scold me, or lecture. I couldn't bear it now."

Father Durant smiled briefly, a few rays of brightness breaking through the cracks of age. "In my confessional, the sins of the flesh weigh lightly on the scale. But pride, how hard I come down on pride. Your Erik knew that. I would make men walk naked through the snow if I could, for pride. Listen, daughter. Bring Monsieur Peillard and the offerings to Caesar which the Republic requires, come to the chapel here and I will bless the both of you."

"Erik was proud, wasn't he?"

"He had a lot to be proud of. I tried to get him to teach me some of his magical song, and in those long weary days chained to the wall, he did. He always acted bored, but secretly he was delighted. Once we chanted the whole Mass together, and when I remarked to him, 'Erik, you should have been a priest,' he didn't revile me or boast about how he would never live as a _capon_, without the love of a woman. He just looked sad. The same sadness I see in the eyes of your son."

The ravens had gone, and the small courtyard garden was very quiet. He stood expectantly, waiting.

"Philippe is Erik's son," I said after awhile. "He married me secretly early in 1881, right before Lent. Then he died within a few months, and I married Monsieur de Chagny, who raised Philippe as if he were his own. We never told him, however."

"So Erik found love after all," the old priest mused.

"Not the love he deserved."

"No man gets what he deserves," he replied. "You have an open heart and an honest face. I think you did what you could. There is nothing left on your shoulders to carry anymore. You say he died in peace."

"I know there's no way to know. But I think he did."

"All these years. So many echoes of him in your son. Tell him if you must, but this is the advice of a simple worn-out priest, a man tired of life, although I think I have something to offer here. Do not tell him unless you can do it without shame. For if you bring this to him with bowed head and shifting eyes, you show him that you are ashamed of him, of his conception, of his birth, and thus of his very life itself. You show him also that you are ashamed of his father."

"Shouldn't I be?" I asked. "He killed a woman in Persia. Maybe there were more women that he killed, like the one that you laid to rest yesterday. He could have been the one who snapped her wrists; Lord knows that he almost broke mine once in a fit of anger. His Persian friend hinted long ago that there were others, criminals and prisoners. Did you know, Father Durant, that he threatened to set off a bomb under the whole Paris Opera, to bully me into staying with him, when he thought that I would leave?" I stopped, breathless and angry. "Perhaps he changed in those ten years, Father, from when you knew him during the war. Perhaps he became more than a musician with a golden voice and a taste for revolution."

Pain flicked across Father Durant's age-seared face. "His judgment has already been secured, has it not?" His voice was gentle. "I was so young then. Perhaps I was taken in. But the Palais Garnier still stands, so you either stayed with him, or he relented. These sorrows you may or may not wish to tell your son. Perhaps it is right that they be buried with you. But unless he ravished you, there must have been something in your heart for Erik which brought a new soul into being, the young man whom I am so glad to call my friend when he comes to Paris and visits an old man."

It was true. "There was," I said slowly, testing the words which weighed out genuine and true. "I have never known anyone like him. It was like being cast into a blast furnace and melted into nothing, but later cooled and shaped into something hard and fierce and beautiful."

"He was like that," the priest breathed.

"Yes," and then I wanted to know something more acutely than I ever had. "Father Durant, did he ever tell you his name? His birth name, his father's name?"

"Never," the old man replied. "He laughed about it, said that the angels had only one name and that was good enough for him. I assumed he did not tell me in order to protect me. But how did you marry him, then, if you did not know his name?"

"Before God. There were no papers, no records, just as he passed unnoticed from this life."

"Not unnoticed, I think," the old man replied. "Never unnoticed."

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Erik had left me sitting in the Louis-Philippe bedroom, wrapped in his peacock-embroidered robe. The doors between our rooms were open and I could hear everything – the water's splash as he drew his bath, the slide of clothes to the floor, the curses when he removed the wrappings on his wound.

I wanted to wear the cream dress with its _point de gaz _collar, but only stroked it gently. The passage to the Communard prison went through damp and filthy corridors. Anyway, it seemed wrong to take it. I pulled from the back of the armoire something grey and coarse and serviceable, then pulled my hair up into a tight braid that I wound round my head like a crown. I looked like a little schoolmistress ready to take on her charges. All I needed was a wooden rod to wake up dozing pupils.

My fingers shook as I buttoned up the old black boots worn soft as gloves from walking back and forth through Paris streets. Across the apartment I heard Erik curse again, blaming the bandage that wouldn't tie properly, then rummaging for a jacket. It sounded as if he were dressing for dinner, not a trip to the other side of the Palais Garnier cellar to spring a man from a trap.

He stood in the living room, waiting for me, drinking brandy, looking just as I had seen him that first night. His coat with the broad black tails opened behind him, and a black tie like a bottomless midnight eye stared sharp out of the face of his crisp white shirt. His own face was entirely covered with an ebony silk mask. His hairpiece shone in the firelight, and he smoothed it once or twice nervously. You could have powdered your nose in the reflections of his shoes.

I sank into his wingback armchair, reeling from a vertigo of the mind. It was as if everything in between hadn't happened. But there it was, the drag and pull of his leg, the wince I couldn't see under the mask, how he fought the urge to grab his leg, to stroke it, to somehow ease the shooting pain.

He set the snifter on the table, and then looked up and down at me critically. I didn't even have to see his face to see the critical stare, the slight pull downwards of the mouth, the curling of his lip. The set of his head a little to the right told me everything.

"I'm sorry," I said. "This seemed the most practical. It's not as if you were taking me out to the variety theater."

"It's not that," he answered. "You think I don't know women, but I do. I don't like to be right all the time. Erik is right about so much, but not this. Erik will keep his promise, but can you blame him for still scenting the air for a breath of hope? You are sure of his love, or else you would not dress as if you were the governess in his estate."

"I didn't even think of it," I stammered.

"There's no need to say anything," he said abruptly.

I looked him up and down too, hoping to see the man who had lain his face on my breast, who held that softness in his mouth like a child, but there was nothing of that man there now. He stood up strong and solitary, all pulled into himself and powerful with reserve, when he didn't move and allow that weak leg to betray him. The beauty of him that I remembered from that first day came over me again.

Which of us were really who we appeared to be? Was I truly the little grey mouse fit only for the attic room of the grand manor, the small skin of my short life as a diva shed entirely? Was he not a man of fierce anger and impenetrable ugliness who had almost killed hundreds of Parisians, but instead a prince swooping by on the air currents of song itself, a black and beautiful swallow? Whose was the mask, and whose the reality?

He went over to the mantelpiece where the little fatal ebony boxes still sat, and picked up a white handkerchief trimmed with fine wispy lace. Opening it, he took from it that round gold circle which I had worn on my finger like a yoke of iron. He stared at it for awhile, then said in a low, quavering voice, "I want you to have this. Think of it as a keepsake, something by which to remember your poor Erik. Melt it down if you like and have it fashioned into something else, if its shape offends you or your lieutenant. But no matter what you do with it, or how you mold it, it will always be my heart."

I looked at the ugly thing, thick and soft, not graceful like the delicate circlets that nestled diamonds or emeralds. "It would be wrong to melt it down," I murmured. The horrific thought came, he's not giving me my freedom after all, and I struggled for control, sensing that any slip of the face or voice would catapult us back in time, unravel all the weaving so far, leaving me back where we started. "But I will keep it, I promise."

It never occurred to me then to go back on that offer, because I had learned that with Erik, no lie would suffice. I had to believe these vows, make them mine from crown to toe, because otherwise he would sniff out my deception. So I held out my hand, but he didn't offer it, not yet.

"Not for forever," he said quietly. "You're right, it would be utterly wrong to melt it. There is one more thing I want you to do with this ring."

Anything, I thought. I am this close, so close. Whatever could it be? Pierce my nose like a Hindoo woman and wear it down Hausmann Boulevard? Anything you like, Erik. I nodded, incapable of even imagining what he would want at this moment, so close to the end of our days.

"It's only a little thing," he went on. "Out of respect for me, your first husband, I ask only that you wear it for the short remaining time I have left to me, and during that time you live as brother and sister with your Vicomte. Then, when I have died, come back and place this ring on my finger before I am buried. Or put it over one of my eyelids, or in my mouth, I don't care." He laughed a little, crazily. "That would be good, under my tongue like a coin for the ferryman. Do you think you can manage that?" He turned to me calmly, his facial expression invisible to me, as if he'd made some simple request for beef instead of pork roast for Sunday dinner.

The room swayed, and I would have fainted had not anger rushed up through me like another spine. Control, I told myself. You gain nothing by flailing about, or worse yet, flying at him. I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted blood and said in my sweetest stage voice, "But Erik, surely you will live years and years," thinking, I would never have called him a devil before, but devil is the word. Does he think he can trick me with some vow like that? What will he do, hunt me down if he hears I have not kept it? I shivered in the midst of my rage. He could. He's entirely capable of it.

He didn't notice the cloying artificial tones in my honeyed words, and said only, "A couple of weeks, Christine. A month at most."

I said it slowly, each word drawn out of me like a corpse dredged from the water. "You want me to not marry Raoul until you are dead."

"Surely you don't plan to commit bigamy, while I am alive?" He spread his hands as if to say, everyone knows this, what are you trying to pull? Then he sensed my mood, for he said petulant as a child, "You won't have long to wait, I assure you."

"You plan to kill yourself, then." I stated it baldly, frustrated that I could see no reaction. "Take that mask off, anyway. What is the point? I have seen your face for the longest time."

He turned away and said barely audibly, "I am ill. I know the signs, and you don't."

"You are ill? What's wrong with you?"

He grabbed my hand still wrapped from the sprain, and I winced as he thrust the ring into it. "Take it, and either care for me, or do not. Either make yourself indifferent to my fate, or stay with me while I meet it." He thrust his masked face close to me, and I could hear his teeth grind beneath it. "Erik doesn't want your concern anymore, do you understand? I ask one thing, one simple thing that any man would expect, and all I get are your infernal and endless questions. The Vicomte is welcome to them. Perhaps he will find a way to stop them, as clearly I have not." He looked at me full of bitterness. "This is not a condition. If you choose to throw it down the sewer, feel free. If, when you read in the agony columns of _L'Epoque_ that Erik is dead, and you leave me to be eaten by rats, it matters not. I will still take you to Raoul's cell."

Turning away, he pulled over his long cold hands black gloves thin and delicate as skin, and completed his ensemble with a top hat. "Let's go," he said. "Monsieur le Vicomte is no doubt roaring by now."

I jammed the ring and its kerchief into my pocket, and then slid it surreptitiously onto the heart finger of my left hand.

o o o o o o o o

You would think that the cavernous corridors underneath the Palais Garnier would be silent, but they were not. Gas jets flickered and hissed along the walls at intervals just enough to keep back the thick dark. Water rumbled in pipes. One had broken, spraying the walls with a shining mat that looked like darkened blood, and Erik escorted me around the spray so I wouldn't wet my skirts. Footfalls echoed down a corridor, but if he heard them, he didn't react. Something skittered, squeaked loudly, and was silent.

He walked ahead of me, unspeaking, and while normally I had to almost trot to keep up with his long-legged pace, now I had to slow down to avoid running over his heels. Once he leaned against the wet wall, almost at a stop, but then pushed on.

Ahead was a blacker patch of corridor than the rest, and a faint rush of air came from it. There were more footfalls, and this time Erik stopped cold, so that I ran into his rigid back.

"What is the ..." I began, but he whirled around me and slapped his hand hard over my mouth. I struggled and tried to protest. Was he back to manhandling and dragging me around again? I'll bite him this time, I won't stand for this, and the anger boiled through me until I heard a little snick, then a whoosh, the sound of a match being lit. In the black maw ahead of us came a tiny pinpoint of light.

Erik pulled me, still struggling, into a side alcove cut into the corridor wall, and pressed me into his side. "Silence," and I felt the word more than heard it, the low vibration so close to my ears.

He was so close, he must have been able to feel my pounding heart. A second "snap" and the smell of burning phosphorus said that another match was lit. Then someone spoke, a man, and at first I thought he spoke in Swedish, but none of the words made sense. German? I wondered. They exchanged a few garbled phrases, and I recognized some. English. Someone, or a pair of them, were wandering around the darkest and bleakest corridors of the cellars, smoking and speaking English.

Erik released his hand from my mouth and breathed, "Shhhh" closely into my ear. I nodded that I'd heard, and he relaxed a little, though still coiled like a snake ready to strike.

Then one growled in one of the few English phrases I understood, "Speak French, damn you."

"Bloody language. Bloody country," said the other, and then he switched to clear, unaccented French in a young, almost piping voice. "Why? There're no frogs to hear us now."

"There's that chap that comes like the night, the one with the hat. You don't know he's there until he's right on top of you." The second voice was gruffer, older.

"The one that nabbed your predecessor, as I recall," said the younger voice.

"We had to scramble for cover that time, didn't we. We almost had an incident. He's very clever, that one. Used to report to Thiers himself down at Versailles."

"A bit wrong in the head, I hear."

"More than that. But bloody efficient. He guards what's down here well."

"You ever seen him?" the younger man asked.

"Only the back of him a few times, sneaking around, always right before they carry out a shipment. Once he was talking to that tall fellow, the one we can't ever get to."

"The engineer?"

"That's him. You've never seen him, have you? Ghastly, ugly fellow. I'd love to get my hands on him. But when the bloody frogs put their best operative on him to watch him, you know there's something there."

"And we want it."

"We'll get it. It's just a matter of time."

"Damn him," the younger man said. "Why can't he make his contraptions in the Marais district with the rest of them, instead of down here in this bloody damp? You stand here long enough, you can feel the mold grow on you like moss."

"Sometimes I think it would be so much easier, just to catch that sneaky chap out, set him up with a clean knife between the ribs, and then onto that ugly fellow's laboratory or whatever it is. But the Home Office says no. Too much risk of infuriating the frogs."

"Damn them, damn the frogs, and and damn this bloody country as well."

"It's all for God and Queen," the older man laughed in English, and their footsteps receded into the black.

Erik trembled against me, not with fear, I guessed, but rage. Finally he whispered to me, "I'm going to put an end to this right now."

"Who were they?" I said as quietly as I could.

"Spies," he hissed, "English spies," and he moved away, leaving a hollow in the air where he was.

"No," I said, and pulled him back. "Don't leave me here."

He leaned on me, still shaking a little, and suddenly the world grew darker, thicker, and more impenetrable than ever. I put my arms under his, laid my head on his chest, and we stood like that for a long time in that musty little alcove, the scent of the men's tobacco on the air but nothing else of them left. Somewhere on the other side of the cellars Raoul sat imprisoned, but right now Erik and I clung to each other like sailors in the last life boat, the one that you think will reach land after all, until it suddenly begins to take on water.

His promise hung between us. I wouldn't remind him. It depended on Erik now. Finally he let me go and said, "Just pray they didn't get to Monsieur le Vicomte before we do."

I had been breathing again, but now it choked me.

"We have to take a detour," he commented. "It won't be comfortable."

We crawled up a narrow set of stone steps, then into some kind of crawlspace that had been cut above and adjacent to the corridor. It was just short enough that I had to bend over, but Erik was twisted almost double, and it must have put additional strain on his leg, because he winced and gasped, and the sweat ran down from under his mask onto his collar. We climbed a little, then went down, and it was very dark. Finally we dropped through a trap into the corridor below.

I recognized it at once, the far end of the long passageway between the Communard cells. It was unbearably silent, and I looked around wildly. Erik seized my shoulder and said close to my ear, "Don't call out to him. We may still have unwelcome guests."

"You said he'd be roaring by now."

"I was wrong. Perhaps he's worn himself out. Perhaps Erik gave him a little too much perfume and he's died."

He said the last matter-of-factly, and I almost snapped out, That would get you off the hook, wouldn't it? Instead, I pushed past him angrily. "Where's the cell?" I said, a little too loudly. "Which one?"

There was a rustle, like a chain rubbing against rock, and Raoul called out, "Christine? Is that you? Christine?"

"Yes, it is, it is I. Where are you? Keep talking, I can't see you at all through these little holes, where are you?"

I ran like a wild thing up and down the passage, Raoul's voice echoing off the walls and making it impossible to tell from where it came. I pulled on all the iron-wrapped doors, but none would open.

"Is that demon with you?" he called out, hoarse and raspy.

"Erik is here, Raoul. He brought me with you, to set you free."

There was silence, then a few coughs. Erik stood at the far end of the corridor, lit from behind by dim bluish light, leaning against the stone-cut wall, his face buried in his arm.

"I think he comes to kill me," Raoul said, quieter now. "Let him unbind me first, and I will give him a fair fight. But he is without honor, and no doubt plans to slaughter me like a sheep in a pen."

Erik rummaged in his trouser pocket, and my heart choked me as I thought of a knife, a noose, some instrument of murder, but no, it was none of those. Just a key. "He has honor," I said to Raoul, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on Erik as I walked towards him. "He has brought me here to let you out. Haven't you, Erik?"

"Wait," he said, and took my hand in his, cold even through the glove leather.

I misunderstood. "No, Erik, you promised," and I struggled a little.

"Christine," he breathed. "Foolish woman. Do you think I am going to stand here and let the Vicomte charge me? Do you know how to get out of here?"

"Get out of here?" I repeated, stupidly. "You're going to take us out of here."

"No, I'm not. Listen to me. Down at the other end of the corridor you will turn to the right. There are two passageways close together. One, the wide and brightly lit one, goes into the maze that leads to the boilers and the steam pumps. Travel down it for about a hundred meters or so, then take the small passage to the left. It winds around and bridges the lake, leaving you on the side by the Rue Scribe exit. You have the key with you, I hope."

I patted my reticule, then looked at his inexpressive silk face that showed nothing. He might as well have been a merchant selling me gourds or onions. But his exhausted depression was all revealed in the slump of his shoulders, in the tiredness of his voice. "Which one is he in?" I said. "I can't see him at all."

He didn't answer, but instead started off down the corridor, banging on each door as he went, heedless now of any excess noise, the spies forgotten. "She comes, Monsieur le Vicomte, Monsieur Lieutenant, Monsieur Heir to the family name. Take your prize and go."

Again came the rattling of chains, and we stood before one of the cells on the farther end. Erik rattled the key in the lock and pulled the creaky rusted door open. Deep inside, mired in dark, stood Raoul, or stood as much as he could, pulled down by the chain on his leg and around his waist. He stared at me with wild animal eyes, then at Erik.

"You, at last," he said. "Erik. Take off that mask, and let me see the face of my adversary," and he crouched down, prepared to fight for his life.

Erik gave a mocking little bow. "You will never see the face of Erik, not till your dying day. Let that be a torment to you. Perhaps she really does lie after all, and beneath this covering lies the beauty of Apollo. You will never know with certainty, so don't deign to speculate." Then he turned to me as if Raoul wasn't even there. "You will do as I asked," he said, a statement more than a question, and grasped my hand, running his fingers around the ring.

"Yes." I meant it.

Raoul, who stood staring like a blind man, trying to look, but not seeing all the same. He tried to pull himself as upright as he could. "You will do what?" he said to me, hoarse and anxious.

"Raoul..." I started, but Erik interrupted me, thrusting his head into the cell to address the chained-up man. "Monsieur le Lieutenant, this woman that I leave you with has promised to continue to wear the ring I have given her until I leave this earth, at which time she will return it to my cold form, and it will go into the earth with me."

Raoul's eye's flew open wide. "What manner of mockery is this? Damn you, fiend, unchain me now and I will pound you until your blood waters these stones, and then there will be no question of any token of bondage on her hand." Erik pushed himself a little further into the cell, but Raoul did not flinch. "Coward," he spat.

"Please, be quiet," I said to Raoul, begging him with my eyes, praying that Erik would not say anything further or call me his wife. Let me explain it to Raoul myself, I begged silently. Not here, Erik. Not now, or we will never get out of this alive. "It's true, I will wear it, but he says not for long. Raoul, please, you have to trust me."

"Indeed," Erik said. "She's proven herself so trustworthy already."

"He's not a coward," I said to Raoul. "Please sit down, if only for a moment."

He collected himself with a great shudder, and squatted on his haunches, trying to touch the filthy straw as little as possible. I pleaded inside with every power I knew that Raoul would stay quiet and that Erik would finally let us go.

Instead, Erik walked into the cell and stood just out of arms' reach before Raoul, whose eyes shone like silver coins, and who began to pray silently, certain that he was going to meet his death after all. His shirt hung open and around his neck hung his brown cloth scapular, moving faintly up and down with the pounding of his heart. I thought Raoul would lunge for Erik or grab at his mask, but he did neither, just as the bird doesn't resist the captivating snake.

"None of your nobleman's tricks," Erik said to Raoul in fierce, angry tones. "No deceits, no more trips to the Bois late at night for you, young monsieur. I may be dead, yes, I am a walking dead man already, but if you beget any bastards, or give this woman a foul disease, or break her heart over another woman, Erik will come back from the dead and haunt you, ghost that he was, that he is, and will be, and you will feel the force of his curse."

"No fear of that," Raoul said, his dry voice calm and under his control now. "You see what I wear next to my skin."

Erik picked up the burlap scapular that hung around Raoul's neck, and fingered it tenderly, almost lovingly. "Half those behind the greenery at night in the Bois wear the same."

"It matters not to me what hypocrites do. I bring Christine to a marriage bed undefiled. Could you say likewise?"

I sank inside down to the bottom of my wet boots. But instead Erik gently placed the scapular back inside Raoul's shirt, and while I could see Raoul's flesh shiver at the touch of that marble-like hand, he said nothing. His hands were under his control and his face was a wall of uncarved stone. "No," Erik said. "I cannot." Then he walked away, defeat heavy upon his shoulders, and Raoul wisely said nothing.

Back in the corridor, Erik said to me, "Take this," a little sliver of metal, not even really a key. "It is for the shackles." My hand shook as I took it. "Don't drop it," he said. He ran his fingers around the golden ring, once, twice. It felt like good-bye. He took off his top hat, and gave an elaborate bow.

"What if we meet ... those men again?" I asked, and Erik laughed harsh and loud.

"Just pretend you're hiding down here for a tryst. That shouldn't be difficult for the both of you." Then he started to walk backward, at first slowly, then faster. "Good-bye, young pride of the seven seas, enjoy your status as head of the family." Then he fell silent and turned aside entirely, walking with the same impersonal purpose of any well-dressed gentleman on a Paris boulevard, his heels clacking on the stone.

When he was entirely gone from sight, I walked into the cell, trying not to let my nose wrinkle at the strong stench of sweat and human waste and fear within. Filthy straw covered the floor and I almost dropped the tiny metal scrap. "What's that, there, the key?" Raoul said. He no longer looked angry. "Christine, calm yourself. Here is my hand, look, give the key to me. I've clapped men in irons before, and know how to get them out. Shush, look, it's all right," and even though he tried to settle me, I started to shake all over, and then to cry.

"You mustn't drop it," he said, trying to stay calm although his voice was almost broken, "We'll never find it again."

Finally I opened my hand, and had to pry it out of the flesh, where it had made a deep imprint. Raoul took it as delicately as the priest holds the Host at Mass, as if it were the Body of Life itself, which in a way it was. With a few twists and clicks he was free. But when he tried to stand he stumbled, his legs all numb from being cramped so long, and he gasped, "Get out of the cell, unless that devil comes back and locks us both in."

I looked around anxiously, and offered him my shoulder. "Oh, God, it hurts," he said, as the blood rushed back to his cramped legs, "They call them pins and needles, but these are knives," and together we staggered out of the dark, foul cell.

At first I didn't know which way to go, to the left or right to get to the corridor that led us to the Rue Scribe passageway, but Raoul had overheard Erik's direction and steered us towards the proper path. As he walked the use of his legs came back, and that was good, because Raoul was wide-shouldered and densely built, and his weight was hard to bear for any length of time. He kept looking anxiously behind him, expecting Erik to leap out at us any second, and his fear spread to me.

"He's gone now, it's all right," I kept saying, hoping it was true.

We found the passageway of which Erik spoke, and it was a long walk through a crack barely wide enough for Raoul's shoulders. A few times he staggered and fell, and I tried to pull him up, but he had to recover under his own power. "I'm so thirsty," he whispered once.

The rage came back, but helpless this time because the damage was done, and I had no way to soften it. "He didn't bring you any water?" I asked.

"He did, but I upset the bucket by accident, and then there was no more. I screamed so loudly, too, hoping someone would hear, all to no avail." Then he shook himself, trying not to complain, and pulled himself up, supporting his weight with his arms on both the walls.

I felt the fresh air, but he was the first to see the crack of light. We came out into a large irregular chamber, and through a narrow aperture at the other end I could see the faint twinkle of the lake, and around it the snaking stone stairway that led to the Rue Scribe gate. "Oh, thank you, Maria," I said, "it's not far now." Then even more welcome came the sound of trickling water. Someone had built a little fountain into the wall, one so like that by which Erik had held me on his lap and bathed my aching head, throbbing from the drug which he'd given me to the point of unconsciousness.

Raoul ran to it and buried his face in the shallow water of the basin, drinking noisily, the stream pouring on his head. No Pan-face spewed water from its mouth. Instead, this time there was a fat little boy who watered the basin in another way, the spigot protruding from under his plump stone belly, and I laughed a little.

Irritated, he looked up, but when he saw the cherub began to chuckle. He threw handfuls of water over himself and a few at me besides. Then he grew suddenly serious, and when I went to embrace him, he waved me aside. "I'm foul, I won't have you sullied by me. There will be time after we get out. So much time," and he poured another handful of water on his head, "so much, you can't believe how good this feels, Christine, as good as the water that poured over the Daroga and I when we were in that catacomb of fire," and then he started upright. "God forgive me, where is the Daroga? As soon as I saw you, all thought of him flew out of my mind."

"I think Erik took him to his home," I said as we walked on. "He talked about delivering a package, and he walked the Persian out, as he did you."

"It was like a dream, but like no dream I've ever had before. The last I remembered, the Daroga and I lay on the floor of the torture chamber, and he came up from behind me with that infernal cloth of his. I caught his reflection in the mirrored wall, but it was dark, and he was all in black, just a shape, really.

"Then I passed into the strangest dream, where I was lying in what looked like a Paris apartment, with a roaring fire. It was so real, Christine, the elaborately carved mantelpiece, a pair of chairs, one wide and leather, the other embroidered all over in bright colors. But it couldn't be, under the ground like that, and anyway, I felt this incredible floating happiness, as if I had Mercury's wings on my feet. Then that tall black presence was there again, and he loomed over me.

"He looked beautiful, like some huge raven with bright wings, and when he told me to walk with him I did it gladly. I would have done anything for him at that point," and then he looked at me with a strange realization. "Dear God, it wasn't a dream, was it?"

I shook my head silently. "What do you remember then?"

"Long grey passages with faces that leapt out of the walls, grinning or laughing, but I couldn't hear them. Lights danced just out of my sight, but when I turned they were gone. It seemed to me that he led me into a chamber lined in black velvet, and then came that cloth over my face once more. When I awoke, it was to reality this time, and a sickness like that of knives piercing my head. I was sick, more than once, and though he left a bucket of water for my use, I upset it in my sickness, and there I lay chained until you came to me."

"He must have given you some potion which mesmerized you. He really is ill, Raoul, because he couldn't carry you or the Daroga."

"And the apartment..."

"I told you, remember, when we sat on the rooftop?"

"I confess," he said, somewhat ashamed, "that I didn't entirely believe you."

We reached the great iron Rue Scribe gate, mysteriously open. So I didn't need the key after all, but I patted the reticule at my waist absently, just to feel its reassurance there. I put my arm through Raoul's, and when he tried to pull away, said, "I don't care if you're dirty. Dirt will wash out."

He squeezed me back, saying, "I can't wait to tell Philippe of this. I doubt he'll believe such a tale, but he must."

Then we stood out on the Rue Scribe itself, and the pavement was wet with rain, one of those cold spring rains that are almost as dark as night itself. A few people stared when Raoul looked up at the great grey sky, spread his arms, and let the rain fall over him, onto his hair, into his mouth, over his face. Then I did the same, and the crowds of Paris swarmed around us, parting for us as if we were a few rocks in the middle of a great umbrella-laden and black-clad stream, and only a few people stopped to stare momentarily before trudging wetly onward.

(... _continued_ ...)


	25. The Curtain Descends

**The Curtain Descends**

I rolled over in bed this morning, looking for the soft underside of Jacques' arm, but he wasn't there. Of course. He's in Paris, and I'm back in Brussels. I hugged the soft feather pillow, missing him, missing Raoul, conflating the two men together in that half-trance between sleep and waking. I hung onto the echo of a haunting dream, a dream of Louvel.

He was the baby, our youngest, a tiny frail child subject to wheezing fits and bouts of croup that left him blue and breathless. Now, not quite so tall as our Phillipe, he is twice as wide. At twenty-one, he is first mate on a barge that travels up and down the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans.

His wife wasn't with him in the dream, nor was their young child. We sat here, around the burnished oak dining table, with Louvel sitting in Raoul's place. I looked around for Jacques, but he wasn't there. Nor was Anki, or any of the children.

"What's she been feeding you?" Martine asked sharply, as she unfolded her napkin. "German cooking obviously agrees with you."

He laughed, his massive shoulders shaking. "It's all muscle, Martine. Care to feel it?" as she looked away sourly. "Well, most of it, at least."

"Save that part for Marelda," she snapped, and her husband Jannecke looked to me with mute appeal, as if to say, did you intend to raise a daughter with razor blades in her tongue?

Helping himself to another mound of scalloped potatoes, Louvel turned to Phillipe and said, "Some day they'll find a way to take the claws out of the cat."

Phillipe said quietly, "Father knew how to keep the cat's fur from getting ruffled." Martine grew white and stricken, and wiped her face.

Then, as if transported by magic, we were on a railroad platform, waiting for Louvel's train. Martine cringed as he made a lavish demonstration of kissing her and poking her slender ribs. "None of you will come to America," he complained, waiting for the conductor's call. "I want you to see our house in Lemay, high on the bluffs. I want to take you on the barge. You've never seen a river so wide."

He embraced Phillipe for a long time, tears in his eyes. Phillipe's lanky arms crossed over Louvel's thick back, his narrow, pointed face hung over his wide brother's shoulder, and for a moment when he thought no one saw, Phillipe let his expression crumple into a twisted pile.

The train whistle screamed. Big and brown, Louvel leaned out the passenger car window and waved until the train went around a bend, carrying him out of sight, and it was like a little piece of Raoul went with him. As the train turned out of sight, the man in the caboose gazed vacantly at us, and his face was Erik's.

That was when I woke, and hunted for a warm side, an embracing arm.

Raoul smoothed my hair like fur, and rubbed my back until I arched, purring. It's only been a few days, yet my skin aches with desire and longing for everyone who is gone and far.

Apoplexy, the doctors said, caused by what they called a brain aneurysm. The wall of one of the blood vessels in Raoul's brain ballooned out like the tyre of a car, and then burst. The thin intense doctor at the hospital looked at me pityingly. "He felt nothing, Mme. de Chagny," he said. "No suffering at all. He winked out like a light," and when he snapped his fingers to make the point, it was as if a spear went through me. I didn't believe him.

Raoul had kissed me that morning, his last to draw breath on earth, and I turned my head away distractedly. The taxes were due, there was a broken pane of glass in the greenhouse, and Uncle Auguste's out-of-wedlock son was involved in some stupid dispute over the distribution of property. It meant a summons to Paris for Raoul, for yet another family council.

I tolerated his kiss without returning it. Forgoing carriage horseless or otherwise, he walked the two miles down to the Rue Henri Maus, and climbed to his second-floor office in _Le Palais de la Bourse. _His secretary said that he looked white and strained when he hung up his hat and coat, and mentioned that Raoul had complained of a headache. In his prissy, high voice, the man described how M. de Chagny had sat down at his desk, put his head down on that vast glossy mahogany surface, and collapsed.

Blown out of this world as if launched from a catapult, he died.

Downstairs something whistled, not a train, just a teakettle left on to boil too long. The maid will be up here with tea, I thought, and at once I knew what I was going to do.

Hanging in the back of my armoire was a large blue velvet bag with leather straps. I had never thought to conceal it from Raoul, although I had never revealed it to him, either. It had hung there for all those years, through spring cleanings and changes of gowns, ignoring the vagaries of mutable fashion. I caressed the soft surface, and inside felt the smoothness of leather, the thin crackle of paper.

I called the maid and told her it was time to pack my trunk. I was going to Grobbendonk, to visit Philippe and Anki before they embarked for London, and the first thing I laid in the trunk's cavernous mouth was that long-silent parcel.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

The golden band weighed on my finger like a yoke of iron, but I resolved to bear it. I didn't know how Erik could know when his death would come. It was a puzzle with no answer, and the watery open sky that flooded the Rue Scribe did its best to wash those inconvenient questions away.

A gendarme smiled as he walked by Raoul and I capering in the rain like schoolchildren. My hair came down and drank the rain as if parched with thirst. I wrung it out in my hands and threw the handful of water at Raoul. Nothing remained of his evening dress save his linen shirt and dark trousers, sticking to him as if they'd been painted on, slick and wet. His top hat, coat, vest, and wallet were all gone, perhaps in Erik's apartment, or the lonely vault of a cell. With no money for a carriage, he walked me to my apartment, all the way to the Rue-des-Victoires-des-Notre-Dame, and to us both, the street ran with victory as freely as with the cold rain of early spring.

At the foot of the apartment steps, he kissed me all over my face and mouth and hair as the amused porter watched through the front door's cut glass. Raoul breathed hard into my neck, his face hot under the cold bath of rain. "I'm off for home. Philippe won't believe this! But he'll simply have to understand how it's going to be, from now on." Then up the street he ran, just as he'd run so many years ago up a sun-streaked country lane on the Côte du Nord , and my heart ran with him.

In the unlit apartment the gaslights sputtered at their lowest setting, while the remains of a coal fire rested cold in the grate. A dark shape sat at the kitchen table but didn't stir when I came in – Margot. Mama was sleeping noisily, her breathing labored. The plump older woman didn't stir, even when I sat down next to her at the unwiped table. A slip of paper sat in front of her, half-crumpled.

"Who sent the telegram?" I asked after a long silence.

"He did," she said, not looking at me. "See for yourself. The boy just brought it. It's plain as Mary's wide arse. I'm dismissed, and with no more notice than that." Tear-stains betrayed her face's hard defiance.

I rummaged around the apartment in my mind. How much money did I have remaining? There was a locked tin box under my bed with about three thousand francs in it, for the most extreme emergency. "How much..." I began, but she cut me off angrily.

"Oh, he paid. Is that what you think, that he'd have left me high and dry? Well, Miss Look-Down-Her-Nose, I don't know what you did to mess it up for yourself, but some of us can't pick and choose our situations as easily as others. He was good to me. No cheating, no 'Oh, nothing in the pockets this week, so I'll pay you the next,' no hands up under the skirts, either. Some of them think that just because you wipe their mother's bum you have to whore for them too. You and that prissy maid thought I was the intruder, but I liked it here, I'll have you know. You can't say I didn't do my job."

Suddenly my rain-soaked clothes lay cold and heavy on me, only slightly warmer than her words. "I'm sorry," I said feebly, casting about for something to say. "You did a superb job, caring for Mama Valerius." Margot doesn't know, I realized. None of it, not the threat to blow up the Palais Garnier, not Erik's rages, not his willingness to kill me and everyone else. I felt suddenly old and tired, as old as Mama, even. There was no point in telling Margot what Erik had done. Let her think kindly of him, even if it means she thinks less of me. She probably thought Erik was going to take me to Monaco, instead of some Turkish or Algerian prison.

I picked up the telegram, and she didn't protest. There it was, blunt and brutal. "Trip canceled. She left. Services not needed. Many thanks. Erik."

"Not even a proper letter," she said, wiping her eyes. "So distraught over you, that he couldn't even write."

There was no point in arguing, and anyway, she was probably right. "I'll write you a letter of recommendation," I said. "A glowing one you can take anywhere." She grunted, but not in an unfriendly way, so I went on. "Unless you already have another position, and don't need it, that is."

"No, nothing else right now," she said, her eyes wet and dull. "How would I? I didn't think I'd need it now, would I?"

"I can't pay you, because I will need to find a maid. But you can stay here, on the cot in Mama's room, until you find something else, if you help me a little, at least."

She looked surprised. "You'd do that?" and I nodded. Then she relaxed back a little in her chair, and said, "So you left him. Mind telling me why? And what you're going to do now?"

"There is someone else. And anyway, I didn't love him."

"Love," she snorted. "Don't get me started on love."

"All right," I said, not wanting to argue with her.

"Is this other one going to marry you?"

Everything at once felt very unsure. I knew with cold certainty that I would never set foot across the threshold of the Opera again, until I went to lay the burden on my finger down for the last time. Mama and I had enough to live on for a few months, if I economized carefully. Could Raoul's brother actually stop our marriage? I had seen him in the hallway, but he had never really spoken to me, that tall, broad man with icy blue eyes. Yet he had written those letters to the musical director, asking that I be cast in roles that showcased my voice and delicate looks. Raoul must have asked him to do it, I thought. It's not even that Philippe would have to expressly forbid us to marry. It just "was not done."

"I don't know," I answered.

Margot gave a disgusted sigh. "Your funeral," she said. "Let me guess. Young, pretty, full of juice, thick wavy hair. And not a sou to his name. Am I right?"

"Close. Except for the wavy hair. It's straight and whether it's still thick, well, it's cut very short, so I can't really tell. It used to be thick, long ago. I think he has more than a few sous, but his brother holds most of them, I think."

Heavily she rose to her feet. "Madame will be up soon."

"I'll come in and explain, when she's awake."

"No need," Margot said. "Before I settled her for her nap, she'd already forgotten we were going anywhere in the first place."

"It makes it easier, in some ways, doesn't it?"

She smiled, and I could tell she had once been pretty. "That it does."

o o o o o o

Raoul and I had danced on the sidewalk at mid-morning, and now it was late afternoon. Bathed, dried, dressed, I set off for Raoul and Philippe's town house. I had never been there, but knew it was on a little street near the _Jardin du Luxembourg_, one of those old buildings built before the reign of the Sun King, although purchased relatively recently by Raoul and Philippe's father before his sons were born.

My ordeal underground had made me brave. A week ago it would have terrified me to approach Raoul's brother or to visit Raoul at his own home. It was a brazen and indelicate thing to do, but the insecurity of my position gnawed at me. There was only one obstacle to our marriage as I saw it, and that was Philippe. If David had been of the fair sex, he would taken the tram to battle with Goliath as I did. We crossed over a glossy river fat with rain, and I cradled in my hand not five smooth stones but the words I planned to fling at him.

The little street whose name I can't recall was off the main boulevard, and so I walked. The worst he can do, I thought, is call for the gendarmes, and if he threatens to do that, I can leave. It's all based on humiliation. He will expect me to be craven and humble, like a servant, because that's how he sees me. He indulged Raoul with me, as one would a child with a new pet. A toy, a little lap dog, or a servant, that's what I am to him. But I won't be that, even if he doesn't acknowledge it. Even if he sends someone for the police.

As the word "police" crossed my mind, I stopped dead still on the cobbled street. The gate that led to the garden in front of the de Chagny townhouse stood wide open, and a police wagon stood there, its thick black horses stomping impatiently. Two officers in their crisp blue hats lounged, conversing, and a third walked out with an older man I didn't recognize. He was bald, and thin everywhere except for his belly, which looked like someone had stuffed a child's ball into his vest. But he was richly dressed and his manner was not only imperious, but angry as he gestured forcefully towards the officers.

Then a fourth policeman came forward, and with him was Raoul. I thought of turning around and running back to the main street, but then my own cowardice disgusted me. Raoul and I had talked on the way. We were not going to mention Erik, or the underground lake or the apartment, or the torture chamber where Raoul and the Persian man had almost met their end. I had fallen through a trap door on stage, hit my head, and wandered dazed down below until Raoul had found me. On the way back up we had become lost. The scabbed bruise on my forehead, from where I had deliberately banged my head on Erik's wall, would support my story.

But faced with the men in blue and the strange, angry man, and seeing Raoul with an officer's hand firmly on his arm, the whole story seemed weak and insubstantial. And where was Comte Philippe? Then it was too late to run, for Raoul had seen me. One of the police officers beckoned me over, and so I had to go.

"Your name, Madame?" he said.

"Christine Daaé, monsieur."

"The disappeared actress," another said.

"They're always disappearing," a policeman remarked, and someone laughed a little, then hushed.

The tall, angry gentleman pointed at me and said, "She! She is the cause of all of this!"

"Let me talk to her, Monsieur Comte de Chagny," another man with a kind voice said as he came up the walk. He wore a brown wool suit and a fedora pulled low over his face, and his teeth protruded. "Detective Mifroid, Madame," and he gave a slight bow. I bowed back, not trusting my knees to dip in a curtsy. "And why are you here?"

I looked around at all those men, feeling very small and unprotected. Raoul stood silently, shaking a little with fear, or some other emotion. Comte de Chagny? But that wasn't Raoul's brother. Detective Mifroid stood quietly, waiting.

"I came to see my fiance," I said as firmly as I could. "And to speak with his brother as well, the Comte Philippe de Chagny. I had some personal matters to discuss with them both."

The older, well-dressed man stuck his face into mine, and he was really enraged now. "You _bagatelle_," he spat out. "What business would one such as you have with my nephews? My nephew," he said, and then turned away, overcome.

Something cold grew inside me. "Comte Auguste, please," the detective said. "I must ask you to compose yourself. I know it is hard, but I must speak to this young lady here without interruption. So," Detective Mifroid said, and his voice was silky as the new cream that rises off the milk, "You came here expecting to meet Comte Philippe, yes? You expected him to be here?"

"Yes," I said, quavering.

"And if he were not here, Madame?"

"Then I would wait. He would have to come back, sooner or later." Raoul's face was white, tear-stricken, but he said nothing, and I saw that the fingers of the policemen who held him dug deeply into his arm. Auguste de Chagny's turned back was as accusatory as his face.

"Ah, but the Comte Philippe de Chagny is never coming back, my dear," Mifroid went on. "You see, he died last night."

Then Raoul sobbed, a long broken cry torn out of him with pincers, and I knew that it was true. "It can't be," I whispered, and the late afternoon changed from light to dark around me.

"Watch out, she's going down," one of the men said, and someone caught me. "Can't lay her on the ground, it's too wet," came another voice. "In here," and when I could see again, there I was inside the police wagon itself, where Mifroid brought some _sal volatile_ up to my nose. I choked and coughed at the pungent smell, and then I was sick, leaning over and retching onto the pavement in front of everyone, not caring, just sick and terrified of what I had heard.

"Can you sit?" Mifroid asked, and when I nodded, he helped me up onto the hard leather bench, came around, and closed the door. We were alone with the smell of wet leather and ammonia. "You knew nothing of this?"

"Nothing whatever. How did he die?"

"He drowned, whether by accident or design we have yet to determine." He waited, watching my reaction like the wolf watches the lamb strayed from her mother.

The lake. It had to be, and once again Erik stood before me in my mind's sight, clothes dripping, covered with blood. "Where?" I bleated.

He looked sharply at me, his eyes saying, she can't be that naive. Instead of answering me, he said, "Madame, what did you come here to tell Comte Philippe?"

"That he should not oppose a marriage between Raoul and myself."

"By your ring, I took you for a married woman already."

"I'm not," I said, covering the ring with my right hand. "It has sentimental value, that's all. Raoul and I want to marry, and his brother objected. Because I'm not a high-born lady." Then I looked into his rugged face, and his teeth looked almost predatory, although his expression was still kind. That kindness undid me, and I started to cry, not so much for myself or Philippe, but for his brother. "Oh, poor Raoul," I said into the kerchief he handed me. After awhile, I choked back the remaining tears. "How did it happen?"

"I was hoping you could tell me. Perhaps you should start at the beginning, with your extraordinary disappearance of the night before."

I swallowed. Now I would discover if my story held any substance or not. I told him how at the finale of _Faust_ I stepped backwards and felt something unusual, but kept going. I must have hit some kind of mechanism for the trap, because it opened behind me, and down I fell. "I banged my head forward as I went down," I said, and suddenly his eyes were all over my bruised face, scanning it.

I told him how I lay insensible for I didn't know how long. When I came to, I had forgotten what had happened, about _Faust_, about falling. I just wandered around down there, going from hallway to hallway, down stairs and through passages, until Raoul found me by those long rows of little cells. It didn't occur to me then that they might have found the Persian, and that he would have a different story. I was too frightened.

So I choked it out, in between sobs and tears. He must have believed me, at least in part, because he opened the door for me and said, "There's nothing here now but police business. I suggest you go on back home."

Raoul stood there forlornly as Comte Auguste glowered over him. "Can I speak to him?" I asked Detective Mifroid, trying to ignore the thin man's glares.

"I'm afraid not," Mifroid answered. "We have more questions to ask him."

"But here, correct?" said Comte Auguste. "We want no public scandal. And I will vouch for him," he said, shooting a look of hatred at Raoul so sharp it could cut glass.

Mifroid bowed. "You will understand that two of my men will remain here as well, and that if an order comes from the magistrate to detain him, I must do so."

"Of course. I see," said Auguste, although it was clear that he didn't.

o o o o o o

I didn't see or hear from Raoul for four days. The newspapers mentioned Philippe's funeral, his interment at the family cemetery, and how the principal suspect was being held at the family town home "for his own protection, pending the determination of the investigating magistrate." Once I thought I spied from the window Monsieur Mifroid's sharp-nosed face strolling languidly up the street, but my eyes didn't focus well at a distance, and when I squinted again, the man was gone.

Then one letter came from Raoul, and then another. He was not going to prison to await trial, it seemed, but he was to remain in Paris until the magisterial verdict was rendered, and both of us knew that meant he would be watched. He maintained his innocence, and I wrote to ask him why he didn't ask for the testimony of the Persian to clear his name. Then I tore that letter to pieces, knowing without being told that his mail would be intercepted and read. In any case, if the police talked to the Persian, that would tear the integrity of my own account to shreds, because the whole story of Erik's kidnapping would come out.

And why not? Over the long years I have asked myself that, but all I knew in those bleak and bitter days was that great hands of shame came up from behind me, stoppered my mouth, and shoved their hard questing fingers so deep into the soft flesh under my heart that I could not contemplate them without stopped breath. There was so much bitter shame there – over opening my legs to Erik in the big curved mahogany bed, or going back to him repeated times, of taking Margot's help and reveling in the freedom it bought me, or lying to Raoul by silence.

And now this monstrous death hung over us. I confess, I had hated Philippe at times, even though he wrote those early letters pleading my artistic case, even though he smiled his cool remote smile and raised his walking stick to me if he happened to pass me in the halls, on his way to "take supper" with Sorelli in her boudoir. No one told me what had happened to him in those days when Raoul and I hung suspended in a thick gel of waiting, but I could guess. He had heard of Raoul's descent into the bowels of the Opera, and had gone after him, probably to restrain him and bring him to the surface. I could hear in my imagination his clipped tones, his perfect French flying like a swarm of hornets from his lips, _If some renegade actor has taken her, leave her to him. How many times has she betrayed you before? _

Irony of ironies, that poor dead Philippe should know me so much better than his brother.

I hated him, and that simply added another brick of shame to the wall which barricaded my tongue. The second letter from Raoul was one long wail of bereavement, where he wrote page after page of memories of his beloved brother. When it came to me, it had been crudely cut open and then resealed, so the police had obviously read it. So many letters have been lost over the years, but not that one.

I keep it still, and on the twentieth anniversary of Philippe's death, Raoul and I read it out loud to each other, and he cried then before me in a way he never had before, not even when Isabeau had died. He cried and held me, and I knew that some wounds really never healed on this side of the grave. Some crooked paths never could be made straight, and of all the crimes I suspected Erik of committing, none seemed so unforgivable in those wretched days as the drowning of Philippe de Chagny.

o o o o o o

Margot left, to serve as a nurse for the wife of some _a__ttaché_ from the Netherlands. I wondered if she curbed her sharp tongue, and if she managed to secure a letter of reference from Erik after all. He must have said something highly complimentary for her to secure that position.

Mama Valerius cried for Margot for a couple of days, and then seemed to forget about her entirely, as if she had never been there. I tried to make custard for her, but she spat it out and complained that it "wasn't right."

Then came a stroke of providential luck. In the hallway one evening I saw Adele, with her cheap feathered hat perched on her glossy black head, and she dragged a cardboard suitcase that looked as if it would come apart any second. She turned away when she saw me.

"Wait," I said, and stood in her path.

She shifted uncomfortably. "Mademoiselle, I'll miss the last omnibus."

"You were living upstairs," I remarked, not moving.

"Yes, caring for the Aubergines on the fourth floor, but they're moving to Lyons." She tilted her head upwards a little, as if to say, what do you care?

"Adele," I said as warmly as I could, "Margot's gone. I want you to come back. You won't have to live in the garret upstairs, instead, you can have the cot in Mama Valerius's room. I can't pay you any more than I had before. I don't know how long it will be, either, but I need you ... and I am sorry."

She set her suitcase down and before I knew it what I was doing, or considered how unseemly it appeared, my arms went around her and her head was on my shoulder. I realized that she was only a little younger and a little stockier than me, and how only a few thousand francs separated us in our respective positions.

When Adele walked in to Mama's bedroom, Mama raised herself up and in a mildly irritated voice said, "Where have you been? Were you on holiday?"

o o o o o o

I have already written of Raoul and our meetings in those days when the police kept him under constant surveillance. When I finally saw him at last, sweating and terrified as we sat over coffee at a small crowded cafe, he whispered, "They've spoken to the Persian," and my heart jumped so hard that the rich golden _cafe au lait_ almost flew from my throat.

"When?" I choked out.

"It was quite coincidental. They were interviewing people at the Garnier Opera, and his name came up as a 'suspicious person,' as someone who'd in past been found wandering around below cellars."

"How do you know this?"

"La Sorelli came to the house while Uncle Auguste was napping, so he didn't drive her away, and thus I managed to speak to her for a few moments. She's resigned from the ballet corps, and is leaving for Zürich, in order to work there. She fell on my breast and wept so copiously I feared she would wake him, and Christine, then I can tell you with certainty he would have set the dogs on her. Uncle Auguste had been going through Philippe's papers, and had just discovered that Philippe had bought her a small villa in Louveciennes, down in Seine-et-Oise, as well as transferring funds to her for its maintenance and staff."

I smiled a bleak little smile in spite of myself, remembering Erik's words, _When he buys you a villa, make sure it's in your name. _Raoul's face clouded. "I hardly see what's so amusing about that."

"It's not," I said, apologetic. "He can't take it from her, can he?"

"I don't think so. But don't hinder my story. La Sorelli mentioned that the Persian had been questioned, but as she put it, he put up such a credible portrait of a madman that they decided to leave him alone."

We looked at each other, the same thought in our minds. "You don't think..."

"Perhaps he did, and that's what made them doubt his sanity," Raoul answered. "But he's a foreigner, in disgrace in his own country, and it is an incredible story. I remember trying to communicate some of it to that inspector I spoke with myself, on the night you disappeared from the stage."

I felt myself grow pale. "Raoul, if they question me in depth, I don't know how I'll hold up. The thought of it terrifies me."

"Christine, don't lose your head. My uncle has told me that since there were no marks on my poor brother, no bruises on the neck, no bullet wounds, his clothing all in order and not disarrayed, no signs of a struggle whatever, they will find it hard to blame me." He laughed bitterly, then grew softer. "I think Mifroid believes your story. I overheard him tell another detective that most convincing mark on your face was consistent with slamming it into the side of a trap door.

"But that I could overpower Philippe ... as if in any struggle I could ever have hoped to best him. I learned long ago not to wrestle with him," and then his face grew first red, then white, and he bit his lip so hard that I feared he would draw blood. "I cannot believe he is gone. I wake up and think I hear him in his room, moving about or snoring. What shall I do without him?"

That was a day when he was tender, but on so many others he was bitter, or he made himself scarce. He went to hear the Holy Mass every morning, trailed by a policeman in street clothing. His life had been so regular, but now I never knew if he would come or go, leave or stay. Some days the post would bring a brief note, on others I would receive a long missive full of embittered regret. While he never said outright that he wished he had left me in Erik's grasp, I wondered, and told myself every day to not wait for the post, to not look for his beautiful cultured hand on the thick cream envelope, to not stifle the crushing disappointment that followed if nothing appeared.

Then one day the mail brought another kind of letter, one with poor scrawled letters on thin cheap paper, and my heart paused for a second inside, because I feared that Erik himself had written me. But the return address was unfamiliar to me, some street over on the Left Bank that I didn't recognize. Trembling, I opened it, and read:

_My dear Mademoiselle Daaé_

_Forgive my poor command of written French. Had I spent more time learning from my tutor in Tehran rather than running from him, you would not now be laughing at my poor spelling and penmanship. _

_I will skewer the bird with the arrow, as my father would say, and come straight to the point. I have seen Erik several times, and he declines steadily, burning with fever. He reminds me of my duty to notify you through L'Epoque of his flight from this earth into the bosom of our mutual father Abraham, but the last time I saw him, he was greatly weakened and cried for me to bring him to you, that he might see your face one last time before he died._

_The ox gores me from both sides, Mademoiselle. That you would be willing to once more come to Erik even after his death is more than I think than a man could ask of any frail woman. To see once again the face of the man who threatened so vehemently to end all our lives no doubt taxes your patience beyond any human limit. _

_But I ask you anyway to consider it – not in the name of my faith, which was weak in my youth and is even weaker now, nor by the name of my country which has forsaken me, and certainly not in the name of Erik. Instead, I ask you to at least consider this, in the name of my poor dead sister, whom Erik loved, and whom I abandoned to her fate._

_I leave it in your delicate hands. When you see the words, "Erik is dead," I beg you to come. He may still live, he may not. In his condition it is hard to tell, and even a day or two can turn the tide._

_In my country we have a story, a very beautiful one. Birds from all over the world decided to find the king of the birds, what you might call the 'firebird' or the "fenix." They flew from mountain to mountain, higher and higher, and at each mountain more grew discouraged and dropped behind, to go back to their own homes. _

_Finally, on the peaks of the highest mountain in the world, where the air was so cold and fine that their wings would scarcely work, and their hearts almost burst in their chests, they sat and panted, exhausted at the end of their journey. This was the highest mountain, there was no other, unless they could fly straight into the fiery heart of the sun. But where was the firebird?_

_They looked around, and each of them glowed with a light most uncanny, and at once they knew. They were the firebird, all of them together. And together they melded into one, and were drawn up into the heavens in a sheer sheet of flame._

_Come, if you can, Mademoiselle Daaé, to that mountain under the earth. I will be there too._

_Yours most truly,_

and then there followed a name written in a strange curling script, unreadable.

o o o o o o o o o o o

Just after dawn, the Plaza surrounding the Opera Garnier was deserted, save for a few vendors setting up their stalls, and a few women coming home from a long night's work at the factory table or from between the sheets. The summons had come, "Erik is dead," and I answered.

Using my great iron key, I opened the Rue Scribe gate, almost daring a policeman to grasp me by the arm. With my kerchief over my head, wooden sabots, and one of Mama Valerius's rusty black skirts hiked up around my waist, I could have easily passed for one of the women who scrubbed the floors.

An old man dozed on a chair near the stone archway. He stirred when I walked past, and instead of a honey cake, I offered him two sous. Black and ragged stumps of teeth showed when he smiled. Then his eyes closed again, and down I went into the narrow blue-lit corridor. My clogs slipped on wet stones. I had brought nothing with me except for those few coins for the ferryman.

I thought I would feel more, fear, disgust, anxiety, anything. The heavy rusted gate barred my way, and I struggled with the skeleton key, chipping a nail as I forced it to give way. When I passed the first archway where the steps forked, some above and some pointing below, my empty stomach clenched. There was no rail on the stairs, and I hugged the far side, as if something would leap up, something that looked like Erik but only more rotten, more bloated. More dead than alive.

The broad walkway around the lake gleamed wetly, the same as it had when Erik took me out for one of our sojourns around the fifth cellar.

Did Phillipe come through this gate without a key? Had Erik left it open as a lure, a trap? "There are some mice in my trap," he had said. "I'll see if they're worth letting go, or if I should snap their little necks."

There was a flat dock, and tied to it his black wooden rowboat. Even though he was dead, I called his name several times and the echoes returned to me like a letter undelivered and unopened. Then I clutched my throat, for the door to his apartment stood open, and from it emerged a strange, repellent odor.

Desperately wishing for some camphor and a handkerchief with which to cover my face, I entered his wide front room. Sheets, linens, papers lay strewn on the floor and over the backs of overturned chairs. The fire had gone out. The smell which had assaulted me was a dreadful mixture of mold, damp, of rotting meat, of human waste, all gone uncleaned. The habits of childhood took over, and I headed straight for the kitchen, to turn on the water.

It worked. Hot water came out of the tap. Erik may have been a madman on most days, but he insisted on hot water, and was scrupulous about his person. If that fetid smell soaked his rooms, it was because he had been incapable of cleaning himself. Under the sink on a shelf was a ceramic dish full of soft lye soap.

"Erik?" I called as I walked into his bedroom. It was empty, the organ covered with a sheet, the coffin bed still full of half-charred fragments of papers covered with musical notation. I wanted to kick the morbid black bed frame. "Erik, where are you?" What am I asking for, I said to myself. He's supposed to be dead. But someone was there.

Idiot girl, a voice inside mocked. If he's dead, who posted the advertisement?

The Persian, I told myself.

Some friend, to leave everything in ruins. To leave him in this state. Who goes off and abandons a dead man in his apartments, knowing that it could take days for someone to find him? Then I paused, stricken. Who indeed?

The door to my room stood half-open. My nose, more used to the smell, spasmed as a fresh wave hit me. I heard a small stirring from within, and stopped, terrified to go any further.

He wasn't dead. But he's ill, I thought, terribly ill, and he needs help.

"Erik?" I called, and was answered by a soft moan, then another shift, and a loud thud as something fell over.

Into my room I ran, and almost cried at the pitiful, horrific sight which greeted me.

He had fallen from the bed, dragging the dark-stained sheet with him. It stretched across the length of the bed, darkly foul. He lay on the ground, crumpled and naked, his shoulders shaking. His breath sounded clogged, as if he were breathing through water.

"My God," I whispered, half to myself. "Who did this to you? Who left you like this?" and then fierce shame burned me. I had.

Avoiding an empty glass which had rolled onto the carpet, I slowly approached. "Erik? It's Christine. Can you speak?"

Half tangled in the foul sheet he raised his head, and against my will I began to cry.

o o o o o o o o o o

I wouldn't be able to lift him back into bed, so I dragged the mattress onto the floor. He cried out when I left for hot water and rags, then clung to me like a child as I sponged him off. His wounded thigh hadn't healed at all; instead it raged angry red and dripped foulness, and the smell from that open laceration was worse than any soil he had left on the bed sheet.

I tore a pillow case into strips and bandaged that seeping hole as best I could, then wrapped a blanket around him and half-pushed, half-rolled him onto the mattress. Around him I wrapped the ribbon-rose-embroidered quilt, because he shivered so terribly. It doesn't matter, I told myself, if the quilt is ruined. It comforts him. He held it tightly, rubbing his face against it, whispering.

Inside his wraps he sweated, half-conscious, saying my name, sometimes mumbling in barely-understandable French, sometimes in a strange language that could have been anything, Russian, the language of the Persians or of the Turks, or perhaps just some tortured syllables of his own, drawn from deep inside.

His regular but raspy breathing told me that he slept, and I gathered the filthy linens, surveying the apartment as I went. It looked ransacked, as if someone had been through it systematically. His violin lay abandoned on the floor near the fireplace, the neck broken. I kicked aside a clump of stuffing pulled out of the slashed-open cushions of the long couch on which Raoul had lain.

There was really no reason to do so, except an ingrained sense of economy, so I rolled up my sleeves, tied up my skirts, and began to scrub the dirty sheets in the lake. That was where the Persian found me, rubbing the stains with the same lye soap I'd used to wash Erik's poor flesh, pulling the heavy sheets around in the murky lake water.

"Don't just stand there gawking," I said. "You can help me here."

"So it is you after all. I wasn't sure," he hesitated. "You look ... different."

"You're used to seeing me in gowns. Think of this as just another costume, Monsieur Daroga. I saw your advertisement. Now, please help me twist this sheet. It's very heavy."

He touched it tentatively, as if it would contaminate him in some way, but he grabbed the wet end and twisted, making sure not to splash his boots or long black cloak.

"Is this how you treat a friend?" I said, as we wrung one sheet after another.

His beautiful green eyes narrowed. "And what of yourself?"

The heat suffused my face like a slap. "You were there that last night. I would think you of all men would understand. Anyway, you simply decided to show up? You'd done your duty by placing your advertisement, so why bother now?"

How I wish now that I could have taken back those bitter words. He winced, then composed his face into a smooth brown mask, but his eyes glittered with anger. "It is you, Mademoiselle, who does not understand. I have been here almost continually from the time Erik's illness grew grave." He laughed bitterly. "From the time when he could no longer threaten to throw me out of his house, or strangle me, or drown me in the lake, that is. If these rooms were not kept up to your specifications, it was because my servant would not accompany me down into these depths, for fear of the _ifreet_ which he was sure lurked down here. I am not skilled in the fine details of housekeeping, and like most of Erik's life, his rooms are full of odd devices and secrets that I have not mastered."

"I'm sorry," I said, looking at his worn black shoes, so carefully polished.

"I went out for supplies," he said, gesturing towards the several large packages he had set down. "That detective, the one with the bad teeth, followed me for awhile, then seemed to lose interest, although it cost me several hours. Panic struck me, for fear of what might have become of Erik in my absence, and for the first time in many months I prayed, and here you sit." He picked up his bundles, leaving me to carry the wet sheets.

Erik still slept, each breath rattling in and out as if it passed through water. The Persian looked at him a long time, face full of pain, until I pulled him gently by the sleeve into the living room. "Can you light the fire?" I asked. "It's not an ordinary fireplace. I looked, but can't make out what to do."

"The cursed thing," he answered. "I can get it going, but there are these valves here that control the flow of air, and every time I think I've gotten them right, it blows out after a time." He fiddled with it, and soon the fireplace roared into heat and light and warmth.

So the Persian cooked some broth of dried beef, and I hung the wet sheets in front of the fire, across the backs of broken chairs. He made tea for us as well, and I hugged mine close to my face, breathing in the fragrant tangy sharpness.

"I shouldn't have said what I did," I repeated. "I assumed you hadn't been here at all, that you'd abandoned him."

"It was not I who abandoned Erik."

"You blame me for not staying with him."

He looked towards the ruined bedroom. The door was left open, so that we could hear him if he stirred. "I discouraged him from pursuing you, from loving you. He didn't listen."

I should have congratulated his concern for my welfare, but instead it piqued me that he should have dissuaded Erik from me. Confused, I said, "Why did you say that?"

"I didn't think at first that you could love him, and feared for everyone concerned should he have discovered that truth."

"You presume a great deal," I said, stirring more sugar into my tea to keep my hands from shaking. "How do you know I didn't love him? Because he was ugly? Because he wasn't as beautiful as you?"

We both sat there, shocked. There was something in the air in those darkened, littered rooms that made me reckless and loosened my tongue. "Mademoiselle Daaé," he began, but I cut him off, trying to keep my voice low for the sake of Erik in the next room, but sharp nonetheless.

"That's always been your difficulty, hasn't it? You never thought that anyone could love him. That's why you didn't fight for him for your sister, wasn't it? When even you couldn't deny that he loved her, it was too late. Or was it? You could have helped her escape. Weren't you the chief of police then, or something close to it?" I set my teacup down and took his hands in mine, feeling them tremble with deep emotion. They were lean and strong, powerful hands, yet his skin was delicate, soft. "Do you know so little of a woman's heart?"

"It is not true, Mademoiselle," he said quietly. Never before or since have I seen a man compose himself so thoroughly in so little time. His hands quieted, and that seamless brown mask smoothed over his features once more. "I knew there were those who could love Erik."

It was a concession, and his carved-ivory manner told me to press no further. "What happened here?" I asked, looking around the demolished room.

"It was like that when I came – the door wide open, everything overturned, and Erik lying groaning in bed. I do not think he caused this devastation himself, for I asked him, and all he would say was 'Why would I destroy my own home, after working so hard to build it?' They even burned some of his music and his manuscripts."

"He did that himself when he was first packing, planning for us to leave."

The Persian put his head in his hands, and then a cry came from the bedroom. Brushing past him, I flew in to meet Erik's open eyes, wild with yellow fire, as fierce as the red which spotted his face. "You're here," he gasped out, in between shallow panting breaths.

"Since last night," I said softly. "Don't you remember? You had fallen out of bed."

His hand clutched the sheet like some thrashing, wounded thing, and he felt the floor, then my leg up through my skirt, until he gripped my arm, surprisingly strong. "I don't know. I'm thirsty."

I raised his poor head and spooned some of the broth between his cracked and fleshless lips. He rolled over onto his side and spoke a little in a language I couldn't understand, so I called for the Persian. "Is it your own?" I asked him, but he shook his head, not recognizing it.

Then Erik slept with his head on my lap, and the Persian rested the dying man's long, slender white hand in his own wide olive one.

"It's not long now," the Persian said, staring at the skeletal face whose skin stretched tight and flushed over the poor sick bones beneath.

"Don't say that. He'll hear you."

"It is the truth. I pray he makes peace with his god, his Isa."

"He had no god, so he said."

"Every man does," the Persian sighed. "Whether he wishes it or not, his god finds him and pursues him."

"What of yours?" I asked.

He said nothing, just held Erik's hand.

Sometime later, Erik stirred, then vomited all the broth he'd taken in. He lay gasping and moaning with thirst. The Persian got up to make more tea for him, laden with sugar. "Don't give up," I whispered to Erik after the Persian was gone. I washed his mouth as best I could, then pulled him to me, almost crying out from the burning touch. "I'm sorry," I said, tears falling loosely now.

He opened his eyes, but seemed not to see me. Either the fever had driven him to blindness, or he was already half-looking into that other world. "I didn't kill that one," he said. "She was already dead. The joke was on me. Already dead, and cold as ice. Not like the others," and he shuddered, deep long shivers. I shook with him, because I feared for his soul, and for the nameless dead.

Leaning down, I whispered into his ear, "Erik, tell me. I'm not a priest, but tell me."

He seemed to hear me, for he rolled his eyes upwards and gasped, "All of them, all their blood, all their breath gone, I can't remember. Oh, God, don't let me remember."

"Are you sorry?" I said, shaking him a little. "Please, be sorry. It's all. It'll be enough."

"One fought me. They never would fight me, not the men, but that one did. Why couldn't he have stayed away? The women, the women fought like cats," and then he called for water. The Persian came into the doorway, but I held my hand up, stop, and he did.

"Not that dead one, though," Erik went on. "She didn't fight, not her." Then he stared at me wildly. "Christine, you're here? It's the fever, it can't be you. You're gone, or dead. Are you dead like her, like them all?"

"No," I said, trying to soothe him, "I'm not dead, and I am here. You're not dreaming."

"Mama," he said. "Christine, Mama's here too." He clutched my dress, hard. "I love you," he said, but whether to myself, or to his mother whom he saw behind his dim eyes, I never knew.

The Persian had crept over by our side, tea in hand. "So you did something right," Erik said to him in between gasps. The dark man hung his head a little, as if ashamed. Then Erik almost smiled, the cheerless grimace of a skeleton coated with a thin varnish of skin, and almost too low to hear said in kindly tones, clutching the Persian's sleeve with his bony clawed hand, "Thank you."

I grabbed the tea from the Persian as fast as I could, spilling a little in the process, for that big brown man who had pulled me from the edge of the Opera roof top, who had led Raoul to my prison and almost lost both their lives in the process, that man of deep emotions and contradictions which I could not fathom, began to shake with uncontrollable tears.

The Persian didn't even look up when I left the room.

I wandered through the apartment while the Persian cried and Erik made occasional soft answers. Into his sepulchral room I wandered, kicking aimlessly at the piles of rubbish on the floor, until I saw it in a corner, almost entirely buried under newspaper. I pulled it out from the pile and smoothed it off, its red tooled-leather cover only a little damaged from where it had been scuffed about on the floor. Inside the red notes sat silently, waiting for the touch of a hand to bring them to life, but they would wait in vain, for that touch would come no more, at least not from Erik.

_Don Juan Triumphant_. Whoever the vandals were who had ransacked the apartment (and once more the British spies came to mind), they had left this unburnt, unmolested. I brushed it off and wrapped it carefully in my thick knitted shawl.

What triumph for you now? I thought, as I slipped back into my old bedroom where Erik lay on the floor. The Persian looked up at me with a face wet but resigned. "He's unconscious, and I cannot rouse him. And his breathing ... I have never heard anything like it."

Erik took in great gasps, then almost nothing, and in between he seemed to stop entirely. "I have," I said. "You've never seen a person die? That's hard to believe."

"I saw those whom Erik strangled with the lasso, or with his bare hands. But not in illness, not like this."

"I know this sound," I said, and put my hand on the bird cage of Erik's chest, the sharp wires of ribs that restrained the soul laboring to get out. "I've watched my parents, and Professor Valerius die." Then the full sorrow of it crushed me, and I looked at the Persian in terror. A life was going to end before us, and soon. "I'm afraid," I said.

"Of what?" he said gently, with that odd calm which follows a burst of tears.

"It all went so wrong."

"I know," he answered, and I didn't know whether he referred to me, or to himself.

The minutes flowed into hours. Unconscious, Erik could drink no more tea, so the Persian and I drank the sweet brew ourselves even though it had gone cold. Then, overcome with exhaustion, I laid down next to Erik for the last time, and the Persian eased his big frame near him on the other.

Tears without sobs leaked slowly down my cheeks, and I must have slept. The Persian's heavy arm, long enough to span the both of us, rested on Erik and myself as the dark man snored, and Erik's chest rose and fell in those odd arrhythmic gasps. I reached around and clung to that strong muscular arm, and when Erik's periods of quiet in between breaths were longer than the breaths themselves, I shook the Persian awake.

He didn't need an explanation. Erik's side where the Persian had lain was warm, but while the side near me was cold, Erik didn't shiver. We waited anxiously for another breath, and I counted the seconds. When over a minute had elapsed, the Persian's eyes met mine. All at once Erik sucked in a great gulp of air, his lungs gurgling and full of fluid.

There was nothing else to be done, so both of us held him as he gasped a few more times. Then we waited in vain for another breath, but none came. It was finished.

From my finger I took Erik's soft lustrous ring, and placed it on his own hand, pushing it a little to get it over the knuckle. The Persian sat, dazed.

Presently I said, "I don't know what to do now."

"We can't just deliver him up to the Paris morgue." Then the Persian's voice grew very soft. "Look at his face. It's as if he sleeps."

It was true. Erik's face had softened into relaxation, even though the skin stretched tight across the mouth. "There's no more sorrow for him," I said. "I won't believe that he's gone to the fire. He was sorry, I know it. I could tell. Anyway, how could God make him this way, and then damn him for it?"

"I know," the Persian said, as Erik's body cooled.

"We have to dress him," I said after awhile. "He'll become stiff, and then it will be impossible."

"Why?" the Persian asked. "In my country, we use only the simplest shroud."

Then I knew that there would be no cemetery for Erik. He would not rest in hallowed ground. There would be no coffin, no marble tomb, no funeral Mass. My heart convulsed. He could not be laid like an animal into the earth. "Because it's not dignified," I answered. "You don't have to do it. I can care for him from here."

"No," he said quietly. "We'll do it together."

So together we washed Erik's wasted body, then dressed him in the evening dress he preferred, laying him out in his black swallowtail coat. I lit candles and placed them at his head and feet. In a cupboard I found a large sheer tablecloth wonderfully embroidered.

"This," I said. "This will be his shroud," and I threaded a needle, to sew him inside it.

He lay clothed in white, and I still didn't know what we would do with his body. Moving him was difficult, even though his frame had become so terribly wasted.

"I know," said the Persian after awhile. "The men of the North were set to sail in their ships, and lit like torches. We cannot light such a fire down here, but perhaps this will suffice." Then he left, refusing to tell me what he had in mind. "Some Persian superstition," I thought, and then I knew. It wasn't his customs which he considered. It was an ancient one of my own, from centuries before.

An hour later he called for me. He had found an awl, and drilled several holes in the bottom of Erik's black wooden boat. Then from the salt crock he had scraped the crusted, rock-hard salt from the sides, and shaped them into plugs which fit snugly into the holes. At first I stared at them, confused. We were putting him in the boat? To go where?

I protested, but he pleaded with me in soft tones, saying over and again, "Trust me. This would not disgrace him."

We carried Erik's body to the boat, and together we pushed the boat into the water, carrying its inert white bundle. The Persian tied Erik securely to the seats, and then we shoved the boat out onto the water. Slowly the boat drifted out to the center of the lake, and then I understood. The salt in the holes slowly dissolved as we stood and watched, and I prayed.

It filled with water, and down he went into the black and greenish murk. There he would remain until the water itself and whatever eyeless fish which roamed those depths eroded his flesh and merged him with the elements.

We stood there a long time after the boat had gurgled its way down into the depths of the lake. Finally the Persian sighed and said, "We're both criminals now."

"We have been so for months," I answered, then gave him a long glance. "Or for years." The dim cellar seemed vast and empty now that Erik was gone. I had to leave, to get out of there, or be swallowed entirely by that vacuum of dark.

"True," he said, and once again I felt his arm around Erik and myself in the dark, although he stood well away from me, and then the feeling passed. Gathering my shawl and its secret burden close to my breast, I left the Persian standing there on the lakeside as he stared into his own version of the black, of a life where Erik was not.

I never saw him again.

(... _continued _...)

**P.S. A/N:** _Thanks, Jennie, for the idea of the dissolving salt plug for Erik's funeral boat._


	26. Don Juan Triumphant

**Don Juan Triumphant**

The gardener has brought in an armload of cut chrysanthemums, September-yellow in the late afternoon sun. You aren't supposed to cut flowers at the end of the day, I wanted to tell him, but held my tongue. He's an Arab, a man in his forties with two young sons who help him with his work. My young Flemish man left to go back to his country village and marry. The fountain keeps cleared of its sludge now; the leaves are raked, the beds turned for the winter's sleep, to awake refreshed for the spring planting.

Mahmoud and the boys talk softly in their language as he shows them plants, runs their hands through the earth to feel its fertility, helps them fill the watering cans. Somewhere in one of the _faubourgs_ he probably has a silent wife. Erik could understand them, I think. He could follow their soft melodic tones, and what he heard would probably make him smile.

Philippe came this morning to retrieve his cello, the old one from his student days. The one he plays at home has already been shipped to London, but he misses the strings under his fingers like he must have missed Anki in their months of separate beds. So he telegraphed, and I knew he wanted to see me, because otherwise he would simply have had it shipped to Grobbendonk by train.

I went to the station to meet him, as if he were still a student coming home for the holiday. He wasn't hard to spot, tall and black-hatted above the crowd, with a pinched, worried expression. He used to have that tight face as a child, when someone had called him "longshanks" at school, or if he couldn't complete a drawing of the little tubes inside some plant or little creature to his satisfaction. I had not seen him since that time in Paris, when Jacques and I lay in Jacques' hotel, my own pristine bed in the ladies' hostel prim and smoothly unoccupied. So here Philippe was, wanting to talk. Very well. So did I.

When we got to the house, he almost twisted his head to look around at the garden. The trimmed boxwoods made a neat frame around the fountain's little stone plaza, where tiny liquid mirrors of water sparkled down the sides.

"I always wanted a Triton there," he said at last. "So did Father, but you insisted on the Venus with the seashell."

"You hated it and said, 'Who wants to look at a girl with no clothes on?'"

He laughed then, and some of the dragging stiffness in our conversation since the railway station lifted. "Triton would have had a spear. I imagined climbing up at night to steal it. But a twelve year old boy doesn't want a seashell." He turned to me, face sober. "You've done wonders with it, Mother."

"Not I," I said. "Mahmoud, it's his doing, he and the boys."

"They don't live here," he said, although it was a question.

"No, they're over in the Arab quarter. He takes the tram. Jacques helped me find him."

He stiffened at Jacques' mention, but said nothing. I clenched a little inside too, expecting an outburst or remonstrance. "I won't have him disgracing you in any way," he finally said.

This was the boy who with nervous resolution had asked Raoul for permission to marry the glassmaker's daughter when she was in the family way. "He's a good man, Philippe. He won't disgrace me. We are discreet and know how to behave in public. But I won't mince words with you. He is my friend, and will continue to be." More softly, I said, "I miss your father too, Philippe."

"I come here and look at all this, and it's almost cruel to say, but in some respect I preferred it all weeded and overgrown. When it's all cared for like this, it's as if Father's still here, and its beauty mocks me with his absence. He picked one of the bright yellow flowers and twirled it around a few times. "Isn't it a bit morbid, Mother, to plant so many of a flower that one normally reserves for graves?"

"I don't think so."

"But then again," he went on, "you never did do things much like other people."

I looked at him, my tall son, soon to go abroad, and a small pain of missing him went through me. "No, Philippe, not much of my life has been like other people's." He shrugged, still uncomfortable, and I put my hand on his sleeve. "Look. let's go stir up some dust in the attic and fetch that cello."

But it wasn't in the attic – very little was, really. No generations of de Chagnys had lived in this house, to fill the attic with old relics. Louvel's old Minerva bicycle hadn't gone with him to America, so it stood covered with a tarpaulin in a corner, and next to it sat my battered trunk from theater days in Paris. Alongside it sat the small wooden trunk that I had brought from Sweden so long ago, resting half-open. Some little girls had put several dolls to bed in it, then left them lying forgotten.

In that trunk had rattled my other wool dress and a few books when the Valeriuses and Papa and I came to Paris and saw the Seine for the first time. A ragged one-armed soldier, recently paroled from the Prussians, wanted us to pay him to carry it. Professor Valerius said no at first, but then gave him a franc anyway. So the soldier went and sat in the sun outside the train station, lighting his cigarette with only one hand, and I carried the little wooden trunk myself.

"Let's try the east guest room," I suggested to Philippe. There it was, propped in its cracked black case, set behind a Japanese screen.

He carried it to the parlor and unpacked it lovingly, running his hand around its glossy maple waist. Rosined and tuned, the low tones flew from the instrument lying docile beneath his fingers, and I left him occupied with his music. I had walked up the stairs of our home thousands of times, but that climb to my room was the longest I'd ever made, because I bore the full weight of what I had to do.

He was still playing when I came back. I carried the leather portfolio and a few loose sheets on top. Erik had inserted individual pages in between the bound ones, as new ideas had come to him, and I had to grip the whole notebook carefully to keep them from falling out, but it was difficult to do for the trembling of my hands. From the middle of the volume I had pulled out some of the second act, a passage that Erik had labeled _adagio con amore. _Its strong and plaintive cello line suggested the longing of Don Juan and his love for each other, as she languished imprisoned in her father's castle tower. It was such an afterthought that Erik had added. Philippe was entirely wrapped in his playing now, and noticed nothing – not my return to the parlor, not my sigh of fear and resignation, not when I rested his father's book on a side table.

After an hour or so he stopped, and looked up in surprise. "You're still here, Mother? You haven't sat and actually listened for years."

"I always listened. My hands were just busy elsewhere. Despite those old strings and an old bow, you make it sing. I could almost hear a voice beneath it."

He smiled, pleased, and in the man I saw the fresh-faced boy flushed from running home from school, hastening to unpack his cello so he could practice before his lesson. During the school day his fingers would twitch in the fingering pattern he was trying to master, and the schoolmaster would smack his hand with a stick. At that memory the anger came up red and hot that my son's hand, so nimble in fretting, so skilled as he moved inside and through living human flesh, could have been hurt in that way. And now, would I treat him any better?

"I have some music I'd like you to look at," I said as he applied a bit more rosin to his bow. "It's very old, and I think you'll find it a challenge."

He looked up, interested. "You haven't haunted the music shops looking for challenges for me in many years now."

"This didn't come from a shop."

"An original composition, then? Whose?"

"My old music teacher in Paris, from long ago." I picked up the loose sheets, and hoped Philippe could read the scrawled red notes which danced like fleas across the page.

"You've never spoken of him. In fact, you've said very little of those days at all."

"Hard to imagine your mother as a singer in the Paris Opera?" My hand started to shake again. So little of this part of my life had I shared with my children.

"I always wondered why you had no keepsakes, no programs, no posters."

"I lived in a small apartment … there wasn't much room," I stammered, but he didn't seem to be listening. Looming over me, he held out his hand for the music, and I gave it over mutely.

"What did he teach you, singing? I thought you said you went to the National Conservatory."

"We were expected to keep up private lessons."

"Ah, I see. So he composed, too?"

"He did."

Philippe looked at me with those strange eyes, alternately black in the shadows, then flashing gold when caught by the late afternoon sun. When he took the pages I saw that his hands were shaking as well. "You've kept it all these years?" Then he seemed to forget his question as he scanned the sheet, sinking beside me on the sofa. "All these notes in the margins, what do they mean?"

"I don't know. I thought they were fragments of poems."

"Love poems, by the look of them." He grew a little red, and I wondered what he'd read. I hadn't been able to make out all of Erik's fragmentary bits. "Did he write this for you?"

Had he? It was one of the inserted pages, not originally bound in the book. "Perhaps," I answered, afraid to look at Philippe's face. "Is there a date on the page?"

He turned it over, looked at the second page. "None that I can see. But the composition looks very interesting. I should like to try it."

"Philippe," I started, then put my hand on the page. "He had begun it long before I … studied with him. Then, he finished it after he and I began working together."

"Tell me more about him," he said, and I shook a little at the tone of command beneath his soft words. "Would I recognize his music?"

"No," I answered. "He never published it. It was never performed anywhere."

"A strange choice for a teacher," he remarked, still holding the sheets but studying me more closely than them.

"He was a friend," I whispered with a dry, choked throat. "He was the Moses that struck the dry rock with his staff, and my voice poured out like water. It didn't matter if he were famous or not."

"A friend …" he mused. "Monsieur Peillard is also 'a friend,' is he not?" He set the music down and began to pace, distracted from the conversation and the thrill of a new piece of music to master. "Mother, what are his intentions towards you? I will tell you forthrightly, this would disturb me far less if I knew he intended to marry you, even with the unseemly matter of the timing, so close to Father's death."

"Perfect timing isn't always possible in love."

"Now it's love?" he said, stopping by the piano, stiff and angry.

"Certainly you know that from your own experience," I said, the anger creeping up from under my collar and flushing my own face.

"What do you mean by that?" he sputtered.

"Johannes wasn't a six-months' child, even though he was small."

"You're trying to distract me."

"Not at all. You brought up my friendship with Monsieur Peillard, not I. Although if you wish to discuss it, I'm more than amenable."

"Are you indeed?"

"No need for sarcasm, Philippe. I will tell you outright. Monsieur Peillard has indeed asked me to marry him."

"There, you are thinking of marrying!"

"I didn't say no, but I didn't say yes either."

"Oh, so you play with him, then?" He was red now, really angry.

"I play with no one, neither him nor you! He understands that I am not ready to marry again." At least, I hoped this was true. "But I like him, and I will spend time with him, be it proper or not. Whether you approve or not. Not that your permission is required anyway."

"What makes you cast aside all restraint and act with such abandon? What has come over you?"

I stood, and we circled each other like cats in the alley, ready to spring on each other at any second. "Go ahead, ask me more questions. Perhaps you will find that this 'abandon,' as you call it, is nothing new."

His face collapsed, suddenly paling. "Mother," he said softly. "Please."

"You know Raoul's and my anniversary, and the date of your own birth. You weren't a six- or seven-months' child either. So don't you dare to condemn me."

"No," he said, hushed now. "I don't mean to."

The anger fell away from me, and I suddenly had the deep and cutting urge to weep. "Jacques is a good man, Philippe. He loves me. I am the one who refuses to rush headlong into marriage."

"Do you love him, Mother?"

The thought of Jacques covering me came unbidden in a rush of a hot whiskered face, soft full mouth, pliant softness over hard muscle, and then in the coolness of afterward, his sharp intelligent eyes behind their twinkling spectacles. He had made no charge for me, no fierce and fatal last stand, no mad rush into oblivion. But then again he wasn't a young man, as Raoul had been. Would Jacques have fought Erik for me? It was a question that shook me to the core, and so I said, "I don't know."

Philippe had pulled himself together. He smoothed his black hair back. "And your music teacher, Mother. What was his name, by the way?"

"Erik."

"Just Erik?"

Once Raoul had encouraged me to try skiing, on a holiday in Switzerland. The feeling of rushing down the slope was terrifying, and for a few seconds it seemed as if I would fly off the face of the earth. Then I collided with the snow, and fell tangled up in a web of skirt and scarf and ski, snow filling my eyes and mouth. Never again, because I could not bear the sensation of spinning out of control. Now it seemed as though I were on that steep long run again, speeding without limit into some unknown collision.

"Yes. Just Erik. He was old when I knew him. He said he was fifty or thereabouts, but he may have been older. Not that that seems so ancient anymore," but the joke was lost on Philippe.

"No surname, or you don't wish to tell me?" He continued to pace again while I sat. Anything could happen now, and I didn't want to faint.

The shame of not knowing Erik's last name went through me like a shot. "Why, are you thinking of searching him out? He's dead. He died before you were born."

Philippe frowned, in him not a sign of displeasure but rather one of analysis. "You said you'd known Father since late childhood, from when you first came to France, but then you'd lost track of each other when Father went to sea, and after Grandfather Daaé died. Then you found each other again at the Opera, when Father happened to hear you singing that one night. But if this man, this Erik was your teacher, then you must have been studying under him at this time, or somewhere near to it."

I swallowed. It wasn't necessary to say anything. It was all written on my face.

"Let me guess," he said slowly, as if thinking out loud, although from his eyes it was clear that he'd already come to a conclusion. "He was tall, and thin, and his hair was dark."

"What was left of it, that wasn't greyed," I answered.

"Did Father know about him? About this?"

The lie bubbled up and sat on my tongue, waiting to be spit out. Raoul had left no journals, no letters mentioning Erik of which I knew. I had pored over Erik's manuscript, and while whole passages were impervious to me, I didn't think they made any reference to Raoul. To admit even this partial truth invited the unveiling of all of it – the whole mad, sad tale. What did I fear worse, Philippe's pity or his condemnation? I watched Philippe pace back and forth. The tiny vibrations from his steps made sparkles of dust fly up from the piano cloth.

Pity. It would be worse to have his pity, and anyway, Erik deserved it, not I. Then this book came to mind, sitting on my writing desk upstairs in full view. If I lie, I thought, my next act should be to throw this book into the fire, because Philippe or Martine will find it otherwise. I will have died with a lie on my tongue, and a lie will be graven into Philippe's heart. And if I burn this book, then some part of me will have died, even though my own heart would still continue to beat. "Yes," I answered. "I carried you under my heart when your father and I married. I told him that he didn't have to, but he took me anyway."

"My father was a good man," he said after a long moment.

"My teacher was your father."

"On the contrary," he said, slamming the sheet music down atop the piano. His eyes were like gold ice. "My father was Raoul de Chagny. A father is more than the body that begets. Any race horse set out to stud can do that. Many girls fall, and you were young, in a city with more cliffs over which to topple than the English coast of Dover. I see it in my own practice, and have gone to childbeds that come a few months after the marriage, or where there is no marriage at all."

"Your father always treated you as his own."

He picked the sheets of music up, and I feared he would tear them to shreds. "This man had a wife, no doubt, and abandoned you. How could you keep this, as memory of your shame?"

"No," I said, taking the music from his hand, afraid that he would destroy it. "It wasn't like that at all. He wasn't married, never had been. He loved me and wanted to marry me. I didn't love him in the same way. Then he became sick, and died."

At the word "sick," Philippe looked over at me intently, and a wave of despair went through me. I had worried so much about Philippe's scorn, or pity, or anger. I should have known that more powerful than any of those, rivaled only by his love for Anki, was his scientific curiosity. Now it was alert as a hound on the scent.

"How did he die?" He sat across from me, elbows on his knees, the way I imagined he sat in his study interviewing a patient.

"He had a wound in his thigh, and it corrupted." Philippe said nothing, just sat there with an expression that said, Go on, I can wait all evening and into the next morning if necessary. There was no way out of this but through. "It was a gunshot wound. Your father shot him."

Astonished, Philippe jerked backwards, and then raggedly laughed. "Father was the dueling type? Now that I would have never in an age expected." He leaned over, fierce and intent. "I hope it was to salvage your honor. But from your expression, I'd say that wasn't the case."

"He had come into your father's rooms late at night. I didn't know about it until your father told me shortly before he died. He never knew whom he had shot, but I knew."

"That man broke into Father's home? Whatever for?"

"I don't know. Your father had offered to send me to a convent on the Dordogne, to take me out of Paris, and he overheard. I don't think Erik went that night to do mischief. I think he was bitter, and sad."

"What man goes into another man's chamber unbidden at night, except to do mischief? Your heart is too kind, and I do not believe you know men. He's lucky he didn't live," Philippe said, his hands clenched in fists now, "or I should kill him myself. I would have killed him that night, had I the chance."

"You don't know. You weren't there. Or rather, you were, but," and I stopped, confused and heavy of heart, deeply regretting prying the lid off the coffin of my history. "There is ugliness in the world, and sorrow, and loss. By the time I was twenty I had known virtually every kind, or so I thought. You've known loss too," and I was thinking of Isabeau when I said this. "However, you knew very little ugliness. Your father and I saw to that. But mine didn't, and I saw the world clear and close up at the most tender of ages. So yes, as a maiden I encountered it – and I don't mean malformation of the face, don't think for a moment I speak of that, but the rawness of circumstances which drive a man in love to desperation."

"You make excuses for him?"

"I make no excuses. All I know is that if you take a dog, even the gentlest of breeds, and beat him and poke him with sticks, he will bite. So much more for a man. The world for Erik was a sharp stick, and he bit."

"When a dog is mad, we put him down, and then examine the brain to find out why."

I sprang to my feet. The image rose too strong to bear, of Erik holding my skirt, wiping his tears with the hem, and saying, _If you only loved me, I would be as a dog for you. I would follow you everywhere, and do anything you wished_. I picked up the portfolio and thrust it at Philippe, who took it almost by reflex, as something his mother handed him, that he must keep from falling to the floor. "This was Erik!" I said. "Behold the man! Yes, he saw your father as a rival. Yes, they fought. But these calamities were not the sum of the man, and if you judge him by his disasters only, the failure is mine and not his."

He rested the big leather book on his knees but didn't open it, just looked up at me as if seeing me for the first time.

"I wasn't always your mother," I went on. "I wanted you to see … I wanted you to know. Perhaps it was wrong of me. Perhaps I should have said nothing, and destroyed what you hold." I knew at once that this book in which I write and the quarto volume in Philippe's hand were linked like Chang and Eng. As those two men from Siam were joined at birth to share one body, so were these two volumes joined in spirit. Both deserved to live. "But I don't think I was wrong. Because nothing beautiful should be destroyed, even if its origin is base."

"What is this?" he asked, almost as if afraid to open it.

"It's an opera, composed by Erik."

He stroked the gold leaf embellishment almost faded and gone. "I always thought he'd been a student from the Sorbonne, I don't know why. Perhaps I'd read too much Victor Hugo. Someone young, intent, perhaps a theologian even." He laughed, but his eyes were sad. "Someone perhaps in the back of my mind I could excuse for a temporary lapse, but still admire."

I sat silently and thought of Philippe's uncle of the same name lying dead on a cold slab of stone by the shores of the underground lake. We had told the children that he had drowned long ago, before their birth. I looked around the parlor, at the brass and crystal chandelier, the little blue figures dancing on the Delft tile of the fireplace, and a thick nausea of the soul came over me.

Raoul had read the autopsy reports, but I couldn't bear to, not after Raoul told me that one of his hands had dangled in the water, and even in the short time between his death and discovery, the little fish of the lake had nibbled away a few of them. I grew as white then as I felt myself growing now. Raoul had gone on to say that there was no strangling, no sign of a garotte, no damage to the windpipe. His brother's lungs were full of water, yet he was not found in the lake, but on the lakeside.

Erik had struggled with the elder Philippe, that I knew. But if Erik had held Raoul's poor brother's head underwater until he died, why not leave him in the lake? Why pull him up onto the stone shore? Why fight with him in the first place? After all, Philippe and Erik had the same aims, to rid Raoul of me.

The dead deafen us with their relentless silence, however, and their stories rot in their breast. My head throbbed and swam. Philippe said something in a concerned voice, but I ignored him. Everything around me in this room all felt stolen from old Philippe, dead Philippe. None of it was mine, not really, and then I knew as if told that when I left this house to go to Perros-Guirec I would never return. Let Martine and Jannecke have it; it's what they've always wanted. The furniture, everything. I'll sign the deed at once. It's built upon the bones of dead men; their blood fills the foundation. It's time to leave.

"Don't admire his life," I said after a time. "Admire the work of his hands. That's what I wanted to give you, not all his failures and mine."

"The truth we uncover is never what we expect, is it?"

The walls and thick blue velvet drapes seemed insubstantial, as if the afternoon breezes could blow right through them, or right through my own substance. "No, it's not."

"You're not coming to England with us, are you?"

"You'll manage well enough without me."

"I suppose," he sighed. "The children will have their tutors, and the house servants we've engaged speak both English and French, even though I've ordered that they avoid French save for necessity. But now, I suppose you don't want to leave Brussels. Or Paris." He said it without rancor, and I hoped he was resigned.

"I'll visit, you know that. And the children can come to Bretagne for the summer holidays, just as you used to do." I paused. "I'm thinking of buying summer property there, a house with a garden, away from the resorts and crowds."

"The children might like to play with others from the hotels."

"Part of the pleasure is walking up the beach to where the hotels are. They'll find other children. The young ones always know how to find each other," and Raoul came unbidden to my mind, young and beardless, running barefoot on the strand. Philippe still looked sad, abstracted. "Will you tell Anki?" I asked. "She already knows about England, I mean, but will you tell her about our talk?"

"Of course," he said quietly. "I keep no secrets from Anki." He hesitated and then said, "She is more forgiving than I."

I bristled a little inside. "What's to forgive? Do you think I told you this to ask your forgiveness?"

"See it through my eyes, as a father. I think of Genna and Larissa, tiny girls now, and imagine some older man attempting to seduce them. I never thought I could kill someone, Mother, but that thought spurs me to it, twice in one evening. Further, it would give me immense pleasure."

"I know you could. But I wasn't a seven year old girl. I was a woman of twenty. Your girls will be women too someday, and will have hearts of their own, as will your sons," and I thought once more of Johannes's almost preternatural love for Lilli.

"You had no father to look after your interests."

"That's true," and I thought to myself, _I neither need one now, nor see you in that role_, but kept that unvoiced. "But consider – had I a father then, and a mother as well, I would never have come to Paris, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Who knows, had my parents lived, we might have even emigrated to America."

He said drily, "I always wanted to ride a horse and fire a six-shooter. Or ride a bull in the rodeo."

"Your brother's never done that."

"He moved there when he was too old. All he did when he first arrived in St. Louis was get a job at that automobile factory, working for the Germans."

"Not the same as in the magazines, is it?" The tautness in my chest relaxed as Philippe laughed a little, then picked up Erik's sheet music from the piano and placed it on his own music stand near where the cello sat.

He turned to me, suddenly serious again. "I don't judge you harshly. As I said, you were without a father, and living an irregular life in the theater. My girls won't have that, because I won't allow it. They'll have a well-ordered life. Every day I see the chaos of bodies breaking down, or broken and beyond repair. It's part of the natural process, but it does not have to be the fabric of our moral lives."

"I understand you wanting to keep your girls out of the evil glare of the footlights, but there's only so much one man can hold in his hand at any one time. When I was Genna's age, my world fell apart. Nothing could have prevented it. We pick up the pieces, and we go on."

As if he didn't hear, he sat down in front of the music stand and took up his instrument. I saw that in his mind he had moved away from the room, from me, from our conversation, and all his focus was now centered on those scrawled red notes. He drew the bow across the E-flat, went down to A, up to B-flat, and after a few more measures he was drawn in. He played for awhile, and the tenderness of memory lapped over me like a bath.

Presently Philippe said, "There was this young Frenchman, a composer. I heard him at an exhibition in Montmartre a few months ago in Paris. This hearkens him …"

"You were in Montmartre?" I interrupted. "You lecture me about a life in the theater. What brought you to Montmartre? And you say you have no secrets from Anki?" My tone laughed but my face was set in seriousness.

"The music," he said. "What else? When did you say this was written?"

"I don't know. Certainly no later than 1882, at the earliest the 1860s. So I don't think he stole it from your French musician. It was for the woman he loved when he was a young man. She died."

"It just reminded me of something, with its haunting quality. It also brings to mind the music of those Russians, 'The Five' they're calling them now. Was he Russian, perhaps?"

"No, thoroughly French, from Rouen. But he had lived in Russia and Central Asia for a time. The woman he loved was Persian, like the leading lady in this opera."

"Do you mind if I finish the piece?" and he tapped his foot, impatient to get back.

"It's yours. The portfolio too. I have no pictures, no lock of hair woven into a ring, no mementos but this. It's for you to take and do with as you wish."

"Don Juan Triumphant," he said. "What a strange name. What is his triumph, pray tell?"

"You," I said. "You were his triumph." Then I leaned over his amazed face and kissed him gently on the forehead. "I'll leave you now. Play as long as you like."

Without looking up, he picked up his bow, and once again a young girl looked out over the gentle forest hills as she waited for a man to elude the guards in the moonlight and come to her window.

Up the stairs I went, thinking, not too many more times now. My room was dim in the twilight. There on my desk sat this book begun so many months before. I thought of the trunks in the attic, but especially the old wooden one with the twirling _rosemaling_ all over its cover and sides.

That would be a good place for it, I thought. No one will look there. Martine hates anything old, anything that would remind her of the peasants. She'll never go up there anyway; she'll send the servants instead. And if she does throw my trunk into the fire without even opening it, and these words fly up in hot sparks to join Erik in his life further up and further in, then it will be by her hand, not mine.

Down below, in the parlor, I thought I heard the Persian girl in her lonely tower sing along with the silver echoes of the stars.

(**_The End_**)


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